Nearly every aspect of the gameplay is uniformly mediocre: the braindead AI will walk around in circles or clip into walls, the Wiimote aiming is awkward, and many of the levels are so lazily designed that you can literally sprint from checkpoint to checkpoint, ignoring nearly every enemy around you, and complete each level in record time. You run for a while, you hide in shadows, you gruesomely kill a passerby, you shoot a few Hunters, you run some more. However, beyond this little bit of choice (which will only be of note to those who played the first game) there’s nothing even remotely interesting about Manhunt 2’s gameplay. The first game forced you to use silent executions with melee weapons for about 70% of its runtime until giving you a gun (and only a gun) for the final 30% - Manhunt 2 pleasingly cuts through the crap by giving you a gun and a melee weapon relatively early in the game, and allowing you to choose whether you want to stab, bludgeon, or shoot your way through the game. The maps still consist of a pretty straightforward A-B route, and the game is still pretty damned linear when taken on its own, but, unlike the original Manhunt, the player isn’t forced to use only a melee weapon or only a gun. Thankfully, Manhunt 2 is nowhere near as linear as its predecessor in terms of immediate local agency. The majority of the gameplay still revolves around stealthily hiding in shadows and taking out “Hunters” - a nondescript, catch-all term for anyone who wants you dead. He gets rid of this character by stabbing him in the neck with a syringe and beating him to death with a shovel. There are some interesting moments in the game’s narrative, but, overall, it’s superfluous at best and infuriatingly hypocritical at worst (near the end of the game, Danny tries to stop his violent nature by getting rid of a character who forces him to commit murder. Suffice to say, Danny Lamb escapes from a hospital with mild amnesia, and has to spend the game’s 4-7 hour runtime killing his way to the truth. Still, the Manhunt series has never really been targeted toward those people gifted with an overabundance of brains - perhaps it’s better to leave this plot detail unspoiled. Anyone with the slightest amount of intelligence will understand the relationship between the protagonist (Danny Lamb) and his friend (Leo) within literally ten seconds of seeing the two of them interact. Explaining the main conflict might spoil a major plot twist for you, but I’m hesitant to even call it a twist in the first place. I’m not quite sure how to summarize the story.
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