Ugh – where do I start this review? Do I comment upon the curious juxtaposition of Manhunt and the Wii? Do I mention the Daily Mail? The game being delayed a year? The censorship issues? Lord knows. I’m sure most of you all know the protracted story of Manhunt 2 by now so I won’t bother spewing on about it (not that I can be bothered either, to be perfectly honest), but what’s more of an issue than the above-mentioned is that the game is actually not very good. At all.

Now, I was a bit partial to the first Manhunt game. The rather odd atmosphere and the whole sneaky sneak thing was entertaining for the most part even if the game did go all FPS for a while near the end, so I went into reviewing the second thinking that I just might be able to scrape a bit of fun off the plate. It took me until the end of the first level of the game to realise that this wasn’t really going to be the case.

You take the role of Danny Lamb, a rather nutty young chap who escapes from the loony bin with his pal Leo and sets off to recover his memories and evade The Project, a rather sinister organisation that are hunting them both down. Problem is, from the very moment the game kicks off a rather important plot twist that happens a certain way in becomes glaringly obvious to even the most knackered, jaded and slightly drunk videogame journalist. In fact, it’s so predictable that they may as well have just inserted a note into the game’s manual telling people what was going to happen.

If this had been the main problem with Manhunt 2 then it could have just about gotten away with it, as it still sees you creeping around some of the most disgusting and depraved locations you’ll find in any game to date. The atmosphere is fine enough and the sense of panic and fear is still reasonable to a point as you find shadows to hide from enemy locations and watch nervously as they amble on past, but that’s about as positive as you can be about it.

See, Manhunt 2’s main problem is that it has not moved on in any meaningful way, shape or form since the first. That’s not just talking about the startlingly awful visuals that I am personally convinced look worse that the original game, folks, but also in the way the game works, and the flaws that come with it.

Take the hiding bit, for example. The use of shadows and dark corners to evade your enemies is fair enough, but occasionally you get enemies trudging straight past you and not noticing at all, even if you’re still particularly obvious. To combat this the game has introduced a mechanic whereby any suspicious fellows who think you are there will look, at which point you have to hold the Wii-mote stock still for a period of time until they bog off. It’s a neat enough idea, sure, and it plays cleverly on the player’s own nerve and shaking hand, but it isn’t that hard to achieve.

The other problem with your enemies is that, as long as you have a decent weapon (which most of the time you do) you can take them down pretty easily if they do happen upon you anyway. Even when there are a couple of enemies dotted around you find that they are about as lethal as a sleeping kitten wielding a particularly blunt pencil, so the whole process of getting found is undermined somewhat. Even when they enemies do get themselves guns they seem to fire anywhere else but into your body, so that doesn’t help matters either.

When you do manage to evade capture and sneak up on an enemy, you’ll quickly discover that whilst the game is still undoubtedly violent it has been toned down enough to lose the real edge that the first one had. You can argue until the cows come home about this point and whether Rockstar piled this onto themselves by effectively prodding the lion when it came to censorship, but whatever conclusion you end up with on that the game still lacks the brutal edge that would have made it make a little more sense given the setting and happenings. The environmental kills (which first debuted in The Punisher) are particularly violent when they occur, but as with the regular executions you will find your vision blurred and the after-effects rather odd, which actually makes you feel as if you are gaining yourself a rather chunky headache.

The game just about entertains enough through these issues to be passable, but it is also subject to a few other negatives that make it even more of a chore. The enemy AI often just wander around into walls and continue strolling around as if they are convinced that they are eventually just going to Casper the Ghost it through them, whilst I had the curious happening of a corpse simply disappearing after an execution more times than I care to remember. It’s not just that Manhunt 2 has issues with the way it plays out; the game has a few silly technical glitches too that hamper the experience as well.

This isn’t helped by the way the game looks, which I could charitably describe as a bit lacking. I’m not in a particularly charitable mood as it happens, so I can only sum it up by saying that it looks like a pretty decent PS1 game at best, with blocky character models and some rather uninspiring texturing. In the first level of the game I came across a character lying on the floor doing what I presumed to be squeezing a tube of tomato sauce upward into the air, only to discover that it was some sort of comedy blood spurt effect gone wrong. Manhunt 2 was never going to be a pretty game with the grime and decay, sure, but it could (and should) have looked a heck of a lot better than this.

The controls, which could turn you into a trained murderer if the press backlash is anything to go by (come to think of it, I suppose the Wii-mote and Nunchuck could act as some kind of My First Garrotte – note to Daily Mail and housewives, I do not endorse this) are reasonable enough – movement is with the analogue stick, and most of the actions are centred around the A button. The executions all have their own particular motioning movements that you need to copy as they are shown on screen and work well enough, although you often miss out on what’s going on during the scene as you focus on the little controller icons instead. C’est la vie I suppose.

Given the above, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that the game really isn’t even as good as the first. Your main character has about as much personality and attachment value as last night’s leftover pizza that you left out of the fridge and covered in salad cream, the story is predictable, the neutered violence is at odds with the setting and the enemies are both incredibly stupid and very weak. It’s not the worst game ever by a long, long chalk and you can still just-and-just enjoy things if you’re not expecting all that much, but the overriding feeling is that of a game that, with the hype generated, has ended up being much mouth and hardly any trousers. The first time around, Manhunt 1 just about got away with it. Not this time.