MANHUNT 2 BLOOD, SWEAT AND FEARS, YES, MANHUNT'S BACK

There's no other game quite like Manhunt. Other titles have outraged the nation's self-appointed moral guardians, but none have matched the unadulterated, undiluted brutality of Manhunt. And if you think that all the media attention it receives means its sequel is going to pull any blood-soaked punches, you'd be wrong. So, so wrong.

The plot is prime nightmare material. You take control of Daniel Lamb, a research scientist who falls on hard times and is therefore forced to take work on a shady project under the supervision of a shifty character by the name of Dr Pickman.

When Funding for his work gets yanked, Pickman approaches Dan and ask him to put himself forward as a test subject for the project. After a long chat with his wife and kids, Daniel agrees to be Dr Pickman's guinea pig. Several years later Lamb regains consciousness inside Dixmore Hospital for The Criminally Insane, and his first act is to strangle the nurse who's trying to restrain him. And so the second Manhunt begins.

IF LOOKS COULD KILL

The first thing you notice in the new Manhunt is that the visuals are tidier and the animations have been spruced up. Fans of the original Manhunt may baulk at the sequel's less grimy feel so, just for them, there's an option to turn the VCR-style static filter on and off. The first level is a tutorial, in which Daniel hooks up with fellow inmate Leo in a bid to escape Dixmore and you learn the fundamentals of the game's methods. The kill system in this sequel works in exactly the same way as the first game. When you're close enough to a victim to strike, Daniel's heart will start pounding inside his ribcage, and the DualShock pad will vibrate.

Holding down R1 will ready him up for the kill and the longer you hold the button down before releasing it, the more gruesome your butchery will be. The first weapon Daniel finds is a syringe and even though he's reluctant to use it, he's seen encouraged to jab it into someone's neck and stab away until the victim stops breathing. The rest of the game see Daniel hacking, shooting and punching his way through the contracted killers who come after him, all the while trying to peice together what happened to him in the years since he signed up to become a test subject in the project. To this end, the game includes several flashback missions, where Lamb relives a snapshot of his past to try and recall what has happened to him.

ACE OF CHASE

The level we played, Best Friends, was one such flashback mission. Here we were playing as Leo, Danny's chum from Dixmore, and we were hunting down a man called Michael, who'd double-crossed us. Bad mistake. The first task was to chase Michael down, so we held down the X button and legged it into an industrial dockside warehouse. Inside we spot a group of hired guns searching the building: they're looking for Leo Unarmed, we take to the shadows. Unlike the first game, Manhunt 2 won't let you get away with murder when it comes to stealth. Squatting in semi-darkness doesn't guarantee safety, because your enemies will actively peer into dark areas when spooked. If they stare right at you, you must quickly press a button sequence to stay hidden, which really keeps you on edge. After avoiding detection from a couple of goons, we're itching to kick off the bloodbath, but there's one problem: no weapon. Luckily, Manhunt 2 introduces Punisher-style environmental kills, so we flick the switch on a nearby meat-grinding machine and patiently wait for the nearest bad guy to check out the noise. Once he's in range we sneak up behind him and feed him into the mechanism, causing blood and body parts to ply everywhere. Thankfully, his buddies remain oblivious to the whole incident, because there's too much background noise in their ears.

HOPE AND GORY

After grabbing our victim's weapon (a baton) and dispatching his chums with a combination of brute strength and meat-grinder, we're ready to track down Michael again. The next area is a puzzle. A meat-packing device sits in one corner, there's a patrolling guard and a conveyor belt leads into the upper recesses of the room. Leo can't walk along the conveyor because the exit is blocked by the mesh gate, so we have to work out how to activate the packing machine. We dispatch the guard with a close-up gun kill (Leo shoves his pistol into the man's mouth and blows off the top half of his head), and approach the machine. It needs a specific weight on the belt before the machine will activate and what do you know, that weight is roughly the same as a human male, much like the one we recently sent to meet his maker. So, we pick up the guards corpse and dump it onto the conveyor belt. He's snatched into the machine and after some sickening tearing and crunching noises, he emerges as a human--box. Meanwhile, we're free to progress and confront Michael on the warehouse roof. This kind of encounter is what will pass for a boss-fight in Manhunt 2. We run after our victim, who's armed with a flare gun. After several exchanges of fire (and some ill-advised hiding behind very flammable blocks of whatever was being kept in the warehouse), we take him down and steal the keys to his powerboat, which was moored in the dock where we entered the level. This kind of running, taking cover, and shooting gameplay assures a much larger role in Manhunt 2 than seen in the first game, and you'll be asked to wield a pistol or two during most levels.

THEN THERE WERE NONE

From what we've seen, it doesn't make the game any less of a spine-tingling stealth-a-thon, but it does add a much-needed dose of action every now and then to keep the game running at a lightening pace. Or in the case of the Best Friend level that we were playing, it adds an explosive climax. See, by the time we'd legged it back to the boat, four heavily armed mercenaries had found their way there too. Our ammo was low. We needed to get creative. First off, a carrier-bag kill on his buddies. Then it was a gun execution on another mercenary and finally a shoot-out with the other two. By this time, we'd nailed the art of head shots, and with a quick couple of flicks of the right thumbstick we were free to steal the boat and escape the level/ So altogether the hands-on time we were given with Manhunt 2 was brief, it was plenty enough to convince us that this is yet another slice of top-quality violence from Rockstar. Although new devices have been added, such as the environmental kills and the ability to create your own shadows by shooting out certain lights, the game sticks to the tried-and-tested Manhunt formula. Most importantly, though, this sequel is as brutal, gruesome and vicious as the original. Faint-harted gamers, concerned parents and knee-jerk commentators: you have been warned.