Having butchered nearly every worker of the club's top floor with abattoir-like precision, my path into the next section was blocked by a doorman operating the other side of a doorflap. If tiny little alarm bells were ringing, then they were bashing me in the cranium when I encountered the door puzzle. As the 'outside' gamer, we know that we need to kill these people. Here, I could easily have been gutting the cleaner. The assumption, of course, is that if you don't kill, they kill you, but hell, this was an S&M club, not the original Manhunt where you're imprisoned in a cat-and-mouse arena, facing off against a bunch of murderous punks. We were several levels into the game, so perhaps the story may have been slightly out of context, but I honestly couldn't see how there was any logical justification for your character's slaughter of everyone and anyone in such a sadistic manner. As soon as I was inside this club, my character was ruthlessly eliminating its inhabitants in that typical Manhunt extreme brutality. After some apparent snooping, the quest for your identity leads you to a mysterious S&M club. Now, let's discuss one of the three Manhunt 2's levels that I was taken through, entitled Sexual Deviants. By threatening certain captors with gruesome demises, you could extract important information, and then decide whether they should croak it or not. Interestingly, there was even a hint of narrative purpose to some of the environmental kills, too - interrogation. As with Max Payne, it was pure John Woo bullet opera served up for the video game medium. Returning to The Punisher, THQ's bloody shooter boasted a tone heavily comic-book in nature, a Marvel world so over-the-top, a lead star so anti-heroically far-fetched, and villains so obviously bad (and shallow), that the whole experience, despite the violence, was really quite hilarious in a disgustingly twisted way. Sadly, things just never are that black and white. So, on the grounds discussed thus far, even with the passivity versus interactivity gaming argument (which is somewhat spoiled by the gameplay similarities between not-banned prequel and sequel), it would seem Manhunt 2 has been hard done by.
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