TinyBuild & Pinokl Games have released an early alpha build of the sequel to 2015’s action-stealth bloodbath Party Hard, and with it an accompanying gameplay trailer.
It hardly seems like eighteen months since the release of the first instalment in Pinokl’s stealth title, probably in part down to the fact that the developer has continued to release DLC for the title up until recently. As a matter of fact, we reviewed it at the start of last year, and just last week, in a subtle attempt to cover the changes the game has gone through in that time.
What I’ve found most divisive about the game from both my time playing it, and discussing it with members of the team, is the difficulty of having to wipe out the entire party, and the issues that come from certain elements of the environment being randomly spawned in by the levels. The latter was a neat feature, but several bad rolls could get you on a losing streak that was hard to shake.
Party Hard 2, which was announced back in February, not only changes up the entire visual style of the game -opting for a 3D, physic-based engine with 2D characters- but also adds in a few new features that brings the game a lot closer in design and play to other titles in the stealth genre.
For a start, your character now has an inventory, and there’s a lot more usable items littered around the environment which can be stashed up for when you need to get out of trouble. This addresses the shortages of interactive points in the map in a big way – all of a sudden you can actually take the violence to the targets.
Targets then, is the other major change. You’ve now got objectives in each level, which means that you don’t need to wipe clean ever part of the level, instead simply having to focus on one, or several, groups of targets. This is a major change to the pace of the game, and, if anything actually increases the stealth aspect of the game as you can simply kite and take out targets while leaving security and innocents standing.
There’s been other elements added too; ‘Party Vision’ highlights interactive points similar to the focus view of Hitman’s Agent 47; and you also have an ‘Insta-Kill’ ability which can be used to quickly clear an area of bunched targets, saving you from the more panicked chasing sequences of the first.
Oh, and you can still dance like an idiot -which you can see in the footage below- and kill yourself with your own traps.
Party Hard 2 is set to launch for PC in the Summer of this year.
The single level alpha is available over on the official site – www.partyhard.game. Give it a go, and if you do anything awesome then feel free to tell us in the comments below.
ITS SO GOOD I AM SO HYPED FOR SUMMER. I AM KNOW THE KEROSENE CAN MAN OF DEATH.