Manhunt on PlayStation 2 is a simple game where you take on the role of a convicted murderer who is supposedly executed for his crimes but awakens trapped in a twisted snuff game where he must sneak and kill his way through a gauntlet of homicidal gang members for a chance at freedom. It's like Hostel meets Hard Target. Kind of reminds me of The Suffering games. It also reminds me of the last book I wrote but that was based more on dangerous puzzles with the occasional fight rather than steamrolling your way through nameless waves of cannon fodder. I played it on a big HD TV so it looked like ass.
The game starts out pretty quick with little pomp and circumstance which is fine because it leaves you to wonder more, like who's the guy talking in my ear? Where the hell am I? Who's watching me? The first aggravating thing you'll notice about the game is the fucked up camera. I’ve never seen anything like it. In pretty much any third-person game in existence, you move the camera with the right analogue stick and that’s just fine. In Manhunt, if you touch the right stick, it puts you in first-person view where you control the camera. You can not control the camera outside of first-person. The whole reason third-person exists at all is to see the surrounding environment, see around your character and around corners. First-person is like the antithesis of that. It’s totally counter intuitive. But at least the game gives you two different types of third-person corner peek techniques. I completely abandoned the right stick for the whole game. I never felt any reason to use first-person. I would have liked to have had some conventional third person camera controls though.
Each level takes you to a different area of abandon and squalor like a zoo, prison, the subway, junkyard and the like. Each place is locked up, rigged and full of homicidal hunters in order to facilitate a good snuff film starring you. You need to find your way through the areas, kill anyone that stands in your way, sometimes finding items to open things or complete tasks like get a crowbar to break a chain to advance through a locked gate.
In the game you can lure enemies to a location by making noise. Either hit something with your weapon, kick something or throw an object. This is really a mixed bag. It's nice when it works but often times you'll make noise within an an enemy's audible threshold but they won't come. Sometimes I'll try to lure a guy that's standing still in one spot only to find that you can't because he’s programmed to just sit there and only respond to you when you run at him screaming with machete in hand.
The hunters are all cliques or gang members, (cholos, neo nazis, some guys that just wanted to spice up their paintball matches,) that I guess subscribe to this production to be able to murder people. They’re constantly muttering to themselves as they patrol. Why does this happen so often in video games? Is it normal for guards to just wander around spouting soliloquies about their issues and their fascist credo in the dark? I don't think they internalize a single thought. I'm sure a couple of them might realistically act this way but it happens so much, it just seems weird. It reminds me of the splicers from Bioshock… only that made sense because they were all batshit insane.
On the HUD is a minimap/radar where enemies show up as yellow arrows (orange for suspicious and red for aware.) It's very similar to the Deus ex HR display but instead of enemies staying on the map, they just sort of waver in and out at random for unprescribed amounts of time. I don't understand why and it's incredibly annoying. If I have two guys on the radar and I'm around the corner and one turns his back to me but the other disappears, I can't strike the prone guy because I have no idea what the other asshole is doing. Eventually I adopted the method of just finding a nice hiding spot in the dark and clanging something on the wall to see if anyone shows up. You WILL get a lasting ping on your radar when the enemy is suspicious (AKA anyone close enough to hear you.) They will investigate the area without disappearing from the map and then you can fine tune where you want them to go by chucking a brick or bottle into a dark corner. Pick them off and when the radar is clear again, go set up in a new place and repeat until you know the area is safe. It works exactly like sonar. You can’t fucking see anything so you send out sound waves which make little blips show up on your map. 
Pretty much the last thing you want to do in this game is get in a fight with an enemy. Fights are a crap shoot. They can last for what seems like minutes depending on your weapon. You have your light attack that barely does any damage and your heavy attack that gets interrupted 90% of the time. Realistically how many whacks with a machete can a person take before they're on the ground? In Manhunt it's like a dozen. Sometimes you can kill an enemy with little damage at all or you can go in and get your ass kicked in two seconds without landing a blow. You can't block but your enemies can. Their grapples always work better than your grapples. If two get on you at once, your options are run away or die. Unless you have a gun, continue striking from the shadows.
Speaking of guns, let me take a moment to praise the shotgun in this game. I don’t think I’ve ever used a shotgun in a video game that actually made me feel like I was using a shotgun. It typically kills in one blast at medium range. At close range, it will obliterate an enemy’s head off of their torso. The shot doesn’t disappear and become useless at five paces from your target like every shotgun ever. It’s one of the most satisfying weapons I’ve ever used in a video game.
The inventory lets you hold two regular weapons like a gun or a bat, a one use execution weapon like piano wire or a plastic bag, and a throwable distraction item like a bottle or a… severed head? Yeah, you can cut off someone’s head and carry it around to chuck somewhere at your discretion. On one hand I’m like what the fuck? On the other, that’s kind of cool. I only wish that when people went to investigate a noise and found a head that they started screaming and pissed themselves. But they’re all sociopathic killers so I guess you can’t expect such a reaction. As for the inventory system itself, there’s something really wrong with the rules of what you can hold when. I can carry a crowbar and a shotgun at one time but not a crowbar and a handgun, (even though that takes up less space,) because someone arbitrarily decided that handguns and melee weapons should occupy the same slot, completely ignoring the possibility that you may still have a perfectly good empty hand waiting for whatever random object it’s allowed to hold. Just make it so you can hold any two of whatever regular weapons. That makes more sense and is easier to remember than random and unrealistic rules about slots and combinations.
At the end of each scene, you get a rating out of five stars (like a movie.) One star is based on time so obviously, I’m not getting that one. I never get time bonuses in games because I like exploring too much. Three of the stars are based on brutality and kills. I think you get higher ratings for assassination style kills versus in combat slug outs. You can perform more brutal kills by charging up while behind an enemy, waiting for the lock-on cursor to change colors to yellow to red. So you’re basically participating in a risk/reward game where you can tap execute as soon as you’re in range for a safe kill or hold it down and tail the guy for an inordinate amount of time, hoping that he doesn’t turn around or become aware of you before you strike. Each weapon has its own set of brutal kill animations. They’re supposed to be all different and scaled on the gore spectrum but some of them look pretty much the same to me. Machete kills always involve about the same amount of action and end with you hacking off the person’s head. So I don’t see why one would be more harcore than the other. As for the fifth star… hell if I know. There’s no indication on the score screen how you get it, just that you can. My guess is that if you get the time bonus and all three stars for the gore fetish, you automatically get the fifth star but that’s stupid because you could never get a four star rating.
The difficulty really ramps up in the later levels. You get pitted against the entire police force and the mercenary group which works for the snuff ring. They’re better equipped and smarter than the other rabble you’ve faced. In a lot of these scenarios, sneaking is pretty much dead, replaced with ridiculously grueling Die Hard shootouts because enemies are swarming all over everywhere and communicate with each other, ensuring that it’s impossible to pull any less than all of them in a two mile radius. It’s completely unfair which means that you have to think differently to beat it, namely use the environment to your advantage. Alert them and find a hall and hide around the corner at the end. Then as they all bottleneck in the hall, pop around the corner for a quarter second and blast them with a shotgun. Then pop back and do it again. Timing is key.
In the last scenario, you’re at the snuff filmmaker’s mansion. Getting in takes you through a hedge maze and sculpture garden and about five-hundred-fucking-million mercenaries. Seriously, where do they all come from? The second you think you’ve got them all, four more show up and come after you, automatically aware of your presence no matter where you are. I actually thought that they were spawning somewhere and I was just going to have to storm the mansion instead of trying to endure infinite waves of enemies. You know what this reminded me of? The last level in Red Dead Revolver. Fucking Rockstar and its mansions!
Two things I don’t understand are if I’ve proven against insurmountable odds that I’m an unstoppable killing machine who wants this guy dead, why in the hell did he have his mercs bring me to his house? Second; who or what is Pigsy? All I know is that he’s this naked maniac wearing a pig head who escaped his chains in the basement and is going on a killing spree through the mansion like me. My only guess is that he’s another snuff film star. Maybe he was recruited against his will to be in this program like me and survived for so long that he became a basement pet. Then he went insane. Maybe they keep him there and cart him out when they film movies. He’s what I would be in a few years.
As weird as it sounds, this game sort of has lore. You have the part of the game that you’re presented with but then you begin to wonder what’s outside of that. How does all of this come together and what’s going on behind the scenes? Someone had to scout these locations and set them up. Who makes them escape proof? How do they get candidates? It must be an inside job with the prison. Who’s in on this? Who gets to hunt? Is it invitation only? It’s the negative space that becomes really interesting when you start to think about it… like a haiku. Yes, I just compared Manhunt by Rockstar to haiku.
The Mansion Assault
Green tunnels- flitting
Red sprays and chunks with no end
More coming. Fuck you.
