It's a simple concept for a game, but the finer details have been excellently executed. You get dropped in a level, and the rest is up to you. You can either start your murdering spree immediately or take your time and explore everything a level has to offer, and in most cases, you'll discover it's a hell of a lot. Party Hard 2 has multiple playable characters, which are unfortunately separated only by power creep, a huge slew of brightly and meticulously designed open maps, and a very clear set of ideals. You always have at least two ways of completing each of the 16 maps, a multitude of randomized tools strewn about the levels at your disposal, as well as a highly interactable environment to complete your objectives. The game tells you what answers it will accept and provides you with a range of tools to formulate your very own questions.

Party Hard 2 struggles between its desire to be a hard core challenge and arcade at the same time, with the peculiar inclusion of the multi-kill meter and a timer, and it'll be quite the turn off for more casual players. The gameplay is not what I'd call speedy, so these two things didn't make sense to me. Some will appreciate this, while others will not, which is why I believe it has a target audience as opposed to a general desire to reach all bored people looking for short bursts of entertainment. Sadly, the playable characters are rather cookie-cutter and only get more powerful instead of having any form of depth. I was a little disappointed to find that the options weren't a mixed bag of positives and negatives for each character, but simple power creep. While the soundtrack is nice for the first hour, it does begin to really grate on you beyond this, being exceedingly repetitive. In terms of system performance, things were mostly in line with expectations; however, CPU usage seemed a little high for such a simplistic title, especially one banking on people streaming on Twitch.

It rewards exploration and self-challenge on the player's part, offering very little in terms of tutorials aside from a few signs making suggestions in the earlier levels. The sheer quantity of options available to the player are very much welcome. Equally, you can complete the entire game by just stabbing people with the starting knife if you wanted to. You really need to go into it thinking that it's a blank book you need to explore and write the rules for. The art style is a delight, and animations are wonderful for 8-bit. For those who enjoy completely open levels, the game is a real treat. Maps only get larger and more complex, and the AI is actually pretty damn good on the challenge scale, and isn't simply trivialized by adding the typical cone of view most stealth games function with.

Overall, Party Hard 2 is a very good but not fantastically good game. The easiest way to describe it is to say that Party Hard 2 is to "Hitman" as "Singularity" was to "Half Life".