Reviews
[Review] ‘Party Hard 2’ Suffers For its Randomized Acts of Violence
Is this a hit, man? Or is it a party pooper? Find out more in our Party Hard 2 review.
I feel like Party Hard 2‘s reach exceeded its grasp. At its best, this is a sort of clever puzzle game, except the “puzzle” is getting away with mass murder and all the pieces are screaming. At its worst, it’s random for the sake of randomness, both in its gameplay and its sense of humor, and it isn’t much fun.
Party Hard 2 is inexpensive, though, and like most of what tinyBuild publishes, it’s weird as all hell in a way that I have to respect. It’s a love-it-or-hate-it sort of game. Either you can forgive it for its jankiness—after all, it’s not like there are a lot of games that let you feed an entire biker gang into a wood chipper—or you’ll end up frustrated.
The Party Hard Killer has calmed down a little bit for the new game. Instead of just being a mass murderer, he’s now more like a vigilante that doesn’t care about collateral damage. He’s on the trail of the participants in a pharmaceutical conspiracy, who have all done him the serious favor of holing up in a series of well-attended parties throughout the continental United States, because the only thing worse than not killing them all would be if he was forced to do so while not remaining firmly on brand.
A typical stage in Party Hard 2, like the first one, is a sort of logic puzzle. You start off on the outskirts of a big map filled with people, secrets, improvised traps, murder weapons, and shortcuts. You can clear the stage either by killing everyone inside it, in whatever way you can manage to do so, or by accomplishing a slightly less straightforward set of bonus objectives. This usually involves collecting some information while selectively assassinating a few specific targets, although you are in no way penalized for any random bystanders that get chopped to bits along the way.
The trick to it is that most of the people in any given stage will freak out and call the cops if they see a fresh corpse or an act of violence, and the cops in Party Hard 2 are low-rent T-800s. You can sometimes drop one with a stun gun or a well-timed trap, but they always show up in groups of two, stick around for a long time, and sometimes know exactly where they need to be in order to most efficiently cancel your Christmas.
The best option you’ve got is to avoid having them show up at all, which means you have to be very careful about who you kill and when. You need to create distractions, take people out with convenient “accidents” that won’t leave bodies behind, stow corpses in whatever hiding places you can find, and pick off lone victims on the outskirts of the map for as long as you can. It feels a lot like a playable version of the first two reels of a slasher movie, when the killer’s roaming around making the first few teenagers disappear, and there’s a unique satisfaction in doing it well.
What makes things irritating is that Party Hard 2 has a lot of randomization. Your objectives remain the same, and a few items on each stage seem to be permanently placed, but other than that, most things are in flux. A room that was a totally safe place to stow a few fresh bodies might turn into Mardi Gras on your next attempt; a storage locker that gave you exactly the right weapon on one run may be empty, useless, or entirely absent on the other.
The partygoers have no fixed locations and no set routines. In fact, they commonly decide to start fights among one another, go to sleep in empty rooms, get dangerously drunk, or occasionally jump headlong into deathtraps. I got a five-kill combo on one stage without knowing why at one point, and it turned out someone had called an ambulance, which had plowed over a crowd in the street outside.
I’m making it sound kind of fun, which it can be. It’s just that there aren’t many reliable strategies in Party Hard 2. There are a couple of useful go-to tactics that might work, depending on the stage, but you have no guarantee of success. Unlike, say, any given Hitman game, you can’t memorize patterns and blaze through a given map using a single predetermined path. At best, your first few steps are usually pretty consistently effective, but after that, you’re forced to improvise. There’s no real way to get a clean, ideal run through any map, because something is guaranteed to go wrong.
On the other, it doesn’t really force you to change things up. All it can really do is hinder you, or slow things down. The idea seems to have been that it would result in dynamic gameplay since you couldn’t count on anything but the most basic elements of a particular strategy being in place, but instead, it’s just a variable, unpredictable difficulty shift. It can be funny—like when important NPCs get destroyed on arrival by random drunken bystanders—but it isn’t particularly satisfying.
I’ve got a laundry list of other minor complaints, like how dumb the “boss fights” are, but the randomness is my biggest issue. It turns what could be an interesting, thoughtful sort of puzzle game into a series of pulls on a slot machine. That’s not necessarily entirely bad, and you can get some fun out of it regardless, but it’s a mixed bag.
Party Hard 2 review code provided by the publisher for PC.
Party Hard 2 is out now on Steam PC
It’s a big world out there, and that alone can make it seem pretty scary for some people. The uncertainty, the unknown, the unfamiliar – while there are those among us who crave exploration, they’re seemingly outnumbered by those who prefer to close their doors, their borders, and their hearts to whomever – and whatever – sits on the other side. The temptation will be strong to label The Outer Threat as a Temu Disclosure Day, but open your heart to it (and accept its budgetary limitations), and you’ll be rewarded with an engaging, hopeful genre tale.
Daniel (Mark O’Brien) is an astrophysicist living on a remote farm with Michelle (Constance Wu) and their two children (Callista Crowe, Isaac Smelcer-Zhang). He retreats every day to an underground bunker where he monitors and searches the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, and one morning he finds just that – clear evidence of an advanced civilization that’s successfully found a way to harvest the power of their solar system’s sun. He’s understandably ecstatic and in a hurry to tell the world, but Michelle, a retired scientist who’s nearly given up on humanity as a whole and chooses to focus solely on her family, is adamant that he keep quiet.
He goes against her wishes, obviously, and sends an email filled with data attachments to his boss at NORAD. The result is almost immediate as electrical power, internet connections, and cell service all shut off in and around their small nearby town. Soon small drones are buzzing their farm and peeping in their windows, MQ-9 Reapers are bombing their bunker, and unmarked cars are following their every move.
Writer/director William Woods makes his directorial debut with The Outer Threat, and while his ambitions dwarf his resources, the end result is a compelling family adventure that argues for opening our metaphorical doors to the unknown. A strong cast, that also includes a supporting turn from the always welcome William Fichtner, helps carry the downtime between suspense sequences and minor set pieces. It’s an undeniably small film, but its ideas and conversations are exponentially bigger.
Michelle’s beef with humankind stems from both the personal and the general state of the world at large. Her father (Oscar Hsu) is also a scientist, and like Daniel, he risked valuing his work over his family to the point that Michelle no longer speaks with him. Her bigger issue is knowing that our species is a poor steward of both this planet and each other, and when Daniel accuses her of having little faith in humanity, she replies only “not without reason.”
One of The Outer Threat’s most interesting sequences will feel like a disjointed detour to some, but it actually encapsulates one of the film’s central themes in one simple exchange. The family is on the road and heading to Michelle’s father’s place – she’s not thrilled, but his past work with the government might come in handy – when they decide to stop for food. They reach a tiny town that looks deceptively abandoned and are welcomed into a diner by the owner, Sam (Fichtner), and his young granddaughter.
He’s initially cautious and explains that soldiers had passed through, telling everyone to remain indoors, but he proceeds to feed the family in need while explaining that he’s hoping to scrounge up some fuel to reconnect with the rest of his family. Sam also shares with Michelle that he hesitated to open his door to them simply because they were different. He was fearful, and now he’s ashamed and worried that maybe he’s not the man he thought he was. “What really scares me,” he adds, “was the thought that maybe, just maybe, we’re all rotten.”
She listens. She leaves. And she never tells him about the numerous extra canisters of gas they have in the back of their pickup truck.
It’s a striking character beat as our protagonist, even halfway through the film, remains steadfast in her disconnect from others. She’s far from the only one in need of change, though, as it was Daniel’s hubris and ego that led to this situation in the first place. “Our kids should be home safe,” she tells him at one point, “but you just had to let the world know how smart you are.” Woods and his cast mine drama from this brilliant but misaligned couple, and both Wu and O’Brien are convincing in their motivations and emotions.
Somewhat less convincing are the film’s occasional swings at big visual effects. Drones and weather balloons in the sky are passable, but explosions, vast encampments, and more land with an iffy digital thud. None of them are deal breakers, though, both because they’re used sparingly and because the characters and their dilemma take center stage.
Woods, whose best and brightest accomplishment remains serving as a producer on the criminally underseen 2020 film, The Kid Detective, arguably bites off a bit more than he can chew with The Outer Threat. His big ideas on both story and humankind are inevitably under-explored in a film of this size, and you’ll be left wishing he had a bigger budget behind him. Audiences are bound to expect something more from the film’s third act, especially, so set your expectations accordingly going in that this is more a film about human connection and ideals than it is a tale of alien invasion.
There are moments here of genuine suspense and thrills, but the film’s power rests in those human beats. From Sam revealing he was concealing a gun while making them pancakes, to Michelle’s father pushing aside huge news of world-altering significance so he can instead spend time with grandchildren he’s only just met, to feuding kids combining their skills for an act of bravery, this is a movie about people who can be so much more than we believe ourselves capable of being.
“For thousands of years human beings have been the dominant species on this planet,” says a character at a certain point, “but that’s no longer the case.” The trailer teases this line, and while you can’t fault the marketing department, it might feel like a bit of a bait and switch by the time the end credits roll. You can choose to be underwhelmed, but here’s hoping you open the door to the film’s hopefulness instead.
The Outer Threat is now available on VOD and Digital.
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