Blood, Gore - and unexpected morality - in Rockstar's banned sequel

You know what’s so in right now? No, not flip-flops with little Brazilian flag logos, silly – torture. At the movies films like Hostel and the Saw series squeeze vicarious thrills out of scenes of murder and mutilation. In secretive offshore detainment camps, American Gls force prisoners into stress positions and blast them with Phil Collins records at stun volume. Worst of the bunch, apparently, is Manhunt 2. At the time of writing, the UK’s British Board of Film Classification has refused the sequel to Rockstar’s 2003 game a rating, citing its “casual sadism” and “unremitting bleakness”. Now , certainly, there’s no denying this is a violent game, one thus not for the faint-hearted. While Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, with its free-roaming maps and fuel-injected vehicles, is about making you feel powerful, Manhunt, with its closed, self-contained levels and linear paths, is designed to make you feel threatened and powerless. Real pressure cooker stuff.

Whereas its predecessor was pretty flimsy on story, though, Manhunt 2 is far more driven by narrative – and actually, beneath all the blood and gore, is far from devoid of morality. You play Daniel Lamb, an amnesiac who has just been sprung from his cell in the Dixmore Institute For The Criminally Insane by a freak thunderstorm. Your path out of the hospital – and your attempt to recover your identity – is guided by a fellow prisoner and former government agent Leo Kasper.

Maim Man

Now it’s not giving anything away to say there’s something odd about Leo. His eerie exhortations to maim and murder echo through your head even when his character isn’t on screen. And it’s cut-scenes where you keep your neck-cracking bloodlust in check enough to actually hold a cordial conversation with another character it’s not uncommon for them to act as if he’s not there. Without wanting to give anything away, if you’re thinking Tyler Durden in Fight Club, well, you’re about third of the way there.

The first kill – a security guard, dispatched with a syringe to the neck – only messy because Daniel, Nauseated what he’s does, vomits up his lunch. As you roam through the hospital’s nightmarish interior, though. Leo’s sinister whispers guides you onto more terrible acts of brutality. As with the original Manhunt, violence is conducted covertly from the shadows. A map shows the location of roaming enemies, the shade dictating their level of alertness – yellow means they’re not aware of your presence, while deep red means they’ve heard or seen you. Often you’re massively outnumbered. So to off an enemy, first you’ll need a weapon – anything from a plastic bag or shard of glass to a circular saw or axe should do the trick. Then it’s a matter of artful sneaking, distracting an enemy with a tossed brick or bottle, or tapping a wall and hiding in the shadows (although aficionados of the former Manhunt beware- now it’s not just a matter of standing stock-still in the gloom; sometimes you’ll have to complete some daft button presses to avoid being spotted by an enemy gazing right in your direction).

Killing time

Killing a clueless enemy is easy: target them with L1 and hold Square and let rip. Depending on the time you have to make the kill, executions range from swift ‘Hasty’ kills to limb-severing ‘Gruesome’ finishers (oh, and keep that severed head – you might be able to use it later), additionally now there’s a variety of environmental executions. Marked on the map with a skull, they include pools of fuel you can use to turn enemies into screaming fireballs, factory presses that splatter them to the width of a cheese slice or handy ledges perfect for gaining the velocity it takes to smash a head like a ripe watermelon. Brutal? Yeah, but most of them deserve it. A gruesome menagerie of leather-clad perverts, fringe-of-society outlaws, and the sinister Watchdogs – matrix-like agents in sharp suits and facemasks who work for The Project, the shadowy company that’s behind Daniel’s amnesia. Yeah, this is a game with something unsavoury under its fingernails. Few other games, certainly have wielded sex and death with such blackly humorous success as this. Take the scene in the adult cinema, where you pick off Project agents with gunfire to the gasps and slaps of an X-rated movie blown up on a massive cinema screen behind you. Those ushers are probably used to cleaning up all sort s of nastiness, but gobbets of brain aren’t among them.

Ironically, the controversy that’s met Manhunt 2 is most definitely a sign that Rockstar are doing something right. The wobbly, half-drunk camerawork, the relentless, slimy dialogue, the long passages where it fells like your heart might slip out of your mouth and slide across the floor – when the BBFC say this is a game of unremitting bleakness, well, it’s hard not to argue. That’s the point. If there’s a flaw to Manhunt 2, it’s a problem that plagued its predecessor: guns. It’s fine when they’re used sparingly in bursts, but some missions lean on them too heavily. As Daniel’s memory begins to return, the past trickles back in a series of flashback to six years before. One mission see you in the role of Leo, decending a skyscraper and picking off Project mersonaries with a sniper rifle. Cliched and beset by rather average AI, it’s a too-long scene that rather spoils Manhunt 2’s elegantly contrived, slowly ratcheting scene of creeping dread. Additionally, while in theory guns can be used to perform up-close executions, the procedure to perform this - pressing on the right stick while targeting an enemy at close range - can also mean that if you’re not quite close enough, you’ll be aiming all over the place, mostly while nearby hoodlums are shooting you in the head. Indeed, the presence of guns remains a dilemma for the Manhunt series - most games reward your progress by offering up an increasing arsenal of exciting and destructive weapons, but what do you do when your game’s specialty is learning how to sever someone’s spinal cord with a sharpened toothpick? Manhunt 2 is a little closer to solving this teaser than the first game, but it doesn’t quite solve it.

Still, for the most part, this is an artful, engaging game that’s far more about strategy and patience than merely dumb brutality. And interestingly too, this is a game that senses how you play it: act gruesome and you accumulate style points, play stealthy and avoid combat and you go without, but have the promise of unlocking extra features after the game’s completion. Meaning, actually, that far from the BBFC’s crowing about Manhunt 2’s lack of moral core, that this is actually a game about morality - namely, how good, essentially conscientious people can be forced, cajoled, or brainwashed into doing awful or reprehensible things - and how they can also eventually regain their humanity. Presuming the world can actually get their hands on it at some point, hopefully soon that will become clear.

Verdict 83/100

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