Party Hard 2
After really enjoying the first Party Hard, I was desperate for more. And when PH2 was released in 2018 I was so excited, but it wasn’t meant to be (RIP laptop). Thankfully, Pinokl Games answered my prayers and brought Party Hard 2 to Xbox One just last week, so I could finally dive in. A little bit more story has been given for this game, showing the monotony of PHK’s life - filled with his daily routine of work, coming home, paying bills, and sleeping before he starts the cycle again. But with noisy partygoers keeping him up at night, it doesn’t take long till the killing starts.
You play as one of four playable characters as you work your way through each of the locations in your mission to kill. Each of the four killers: Party Hard Killer, Wannabe, Kao Tech and Shawn O’Panda, have different abilities and weapons allowing for additional replayability as levels are ticked off under each character individually. During my first run I stuck to playing as the Party Hard Killer, for old times’ sake, but I had a lot of fun trying out each of the others and how best to take advantage of their skills.
Instead of just having the aim of killing everyone in a level as we did in the first game, we now have Objectives. Mission Objectives give you different aims such as killing specific targets. Successfully pulling off these objectives will allow you to complete a level, but optional hidden objectives can net you extra points. Challenges are also available, further increasing the experience you gain in each of the playstyles shown at the end of each level.
Each task increases your experience in the following areas: Stealth, Criminal, Anarchy or Mystic. Offloading a corpse in a dumpster will increase Stealth, whereas achieving a combo by killing a whole bunch of partygoers with an explosion can grant you Anarchy points. Having points in each of these available play style categories will allow you to unlock characters as well as grant you some additional items that you can utilise in your play through. Items will be found scattered around a level, much like in the first game, and these can be used to kill in all manner of ways. Purple boxes will sometimes show up with extra items, tying in with the points you’ve gained, to allow you more creativity in your mission.
New to Party Hard 2 is the ability to combine items - this way you can craft molotovs to cause even more havoc than the singular booze and gasoline items would have. Sometimes waiting for particular items to appear in the purple boxes will land you a huge payoff due to the ability to craft, so you’ll find yourself doing a lot of weighing up the pros and cons as you try to work through a level. Being careful about escape routes and not letting people spot you in action is another thing to keep in mind, as cops can be fairly suspicious and are an absolute nightmare to escape from at times - your knife won’t really do much against them, so being able to jump through a shortcut to get away from them could be the deciding factor in your survival.
As well as the addition of crafting we now have Boss Battles too, which require a fair bit of trial and error to get through. These are a really interesting extra to the game, as it makes things a little different from the standard levels (which mostly follow a similar process).
The graphics have evolved into a 3D style, whilst still retaining the pixel art from the first game. It’s a very interesting look and works well with the gameplay. Much like the original, the soundtrack is fantastic, with a variety of tracks as you progress.
At £16.74 on the Xbox Store, Party Hard 2 is well worth the price, especially if you go for the Collector’s Edition bundle at £19.99 which also gets you access to the Alien Butt Form DLC - normally priced at £5.79 outwith the CE bundle. This super fun DLC adds new playable characters, maps and abilities with a totally bizarre twist.
In the end, we decided to give Party Hard 2 the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.
Have you played Party Hard 2 yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to TinyBuild for the Party Hard 2 Xbox One Review Code!
