um bom experimento da rockstar, mas com certeza trincado nos dias de hoje por diversos motivos

o jogo vai se perdendo muito com o tempo, o inicio é incrível, vc tá completamente assustado, não familiarizado com o ambiente do jogo, medo da suposta violência que poderia ter, mas no fim vc só perde a paciência de tudo tendo q ficar batendo na porra da parede umas 50 vezes se perguntando se os bicho chegam mais rápido ate tu

sem contar o combate totalmente truncado e repetitivo, nenhuma arma corpo a corpo possui vantagens e desvantagens uma das outras, a unica coisa q muda é a animação, quão o mais vc fica mirado, mais brutal fica a animação, tendo 3 níveis de cada arma, mas convenhamos, vc só faz isso uma vez só pra ver como é a animação de morte, dps só fica matando por trás com um click mesmo (a não ser q vc queira pegar o numero maximo de estrela), mas no final de tudo eu só comecei a levar o pé de cabra mesmo pq vc conseguia abrir cadeado

o stealth tbm lá perto pro final do jogo vai pro krl, pq vc pega as armas e esquece totalmente desse sistema (q pelo menos foi assim pra mim), de início é mais satisfatório apenas com pistolas e escopetas mas depois fica totalmente injusto quando os inimigos portam uma smg ou um rifle (tu praticamente morre com um hit se moscar), e fica pior ainda no endgame, q vira um spawn desses npc portando essas armas, chegando a vc só ter q matar de parede fazendo uma filinha de tiro na cabeça de doze

a historia do jogo também é algo bem fodase, de início vc só é ordenado (oq faz sentido pq nosso protagonista era pra estar morto mas teve uma segunda chance), mas com o tempo surge um arco de vingança virando um filme sem graça
a boss fight "final" tem uma atmosfera boa pq vc realmente se sente sendo a presa do piggsy, entretanto ela peca bastante no sentido técnico pq é bem fácil se esconder dele pra pegar os pedaços de vidro e dar dano por trás

um remake desse jogo seria perfeito, notoriamente os erros técnicos do stealth poderiam ser melhorados em uma versão mais nova, mas como o tema é pesado, tem referencias ao nazismo, tortura, violencia, manipulação (e assim vai...) um remake prejudicaria totalmente a reputação da empresa, a não ser q ela censure a porra toda, mas obviamente acabaria com o charme e a intuição do jogo

Definitivamente não é o que eu esperava, tinha toda uma mística ao redor desse jogo, a polêmica, o tema pesado, então eu tinha boas expectativas, e acho que esse foi meu erro.

O jogo não é terrível, tampouco uma perca de tempo, porém, ele possui defeitos consideráveis. Primeiro, o jogo é muito longo mesmo, são 20 cenários divididos em partes menores, e detalhe, depois de um tempo eu abandonei o stealth e fui na loucura mesmo, e continua bem longo. Segundo, o jogo é repetitivo demais, você vê todas as variações de morte, as animações em si são na sua maioria reaproveitadas de outros jogos como a barra de vida ser junto a mira do GTA San Andreas, isso tira a magia do jogo. E por último o mais importante, o jogo se perde e se perde grotescamente, o início é maravilhoso, você completamente assustado, coração na boca, o medo da suposta violência gráfica do jogo, incerto do ambiente e por ai vai, no fim você só tá rushando tudo e batendo nas paredes 47 vezes pra ver se o npc chega mais rápido.

A história do jogo é bem genérica e quase irrelevante, o Cash passa a maior parte do jogo sem falar e você se acostuma com isso pois ele realmente não tá em posição de reclamar já que devia estar morto mas teve uma segunda chance desde que fizesse o que lhe era ordenado, e depois chega uma trama de vingança do nada e vira um filme de ação genérico.

A boss fight no final é boa porém fica extremamente chata depois de algumas tentativas. Ela é boa porque, apesar de não parecer, no jogo nós somos a "presa" tentando sobreviver, estamos em menor número e contra psicopatas armados, mas também somos o protagonista então obviamente matamos todos e perdemos esse sentimento e viramos o "caçador". Mas o Piggsy retoma esse pavor, contra ele, você é, sem sombra de dúvidas, a presa. Porém a luta é chata, corre por ai pra achar uma arma, esfaqueia ele e repete, a magia vai embora muito rápido.

Enfim, esse jogo nunca vai ganhar um remake, o tema é pesado, referências ao Nazismo, violência e etc. Em uma época em que as pessoas, por algum motivo que eu desconheço, são muito sensíveis com esses assuntos, esse tipo de jogo é inviável e acabaria com a reputação da empresa.

O tipo de jogo que você joga uma vez, talvez duas se não tiver jogado na dificuldade mais alta desde o início e coletar as 100 estrelas, e acabou, não toca nunca mais.

A neat little psychological horror stealth game that holds up surprisingly well. The stealth game part is really fun for the most part minus a few hiccups, but it loses its luster a bit when it turns into a straight up shooter in the second half. I feel like a lot of the appeal when this game came out was how violent and gory it was and while a couple things made me wince, most of it feels pretty tame honestly. I don't even think at the time most of it would have felt too out of place when you compare it to most horror media from the time. Brian Cox absolutely kills it as The Director.

Primeiro de tudo fica o aviso: se tu for jogar no PC, saiba que a Rockstar disponibilizou, por algum raio de motivo, uma cópia PIRATA do jogo na Steam. E, pra quem não sabe, as cópias piratas de Manhunt tem bugs propositais antipirataria, então boa sorte correndo atrás de fixes pro jogo.
Mesmo ignorando esse fato, eu queria muito dar 4 estrelas, no mínimo, pro jogo, mas não dá não. O jogo é muito bom, é divertido, mas ao mesmo tempo é mal polido, ultrapassado e tem uma ausência de chekpoints irritante que realmente tira a graça do jogo, você é obrigado a repetir trechos longos e legitimamente difíceis diversas vezes. Eu dei muito rage quit nesse jogo até zerar por causa disso.
Mas a falta de polimento grave e a escassez de checkpoints em um jogo que necessita deles é o que me impede de dar uma nota mais alta, fora isso, o jogo é muito bom e merecia se tornar uma trilogia.

Manhunt is a game that's always really interested me. I've always had a grim, morbid fascination in the transgressive and controversial, the way the media can make people fear a film or game more than the actual work itself could. When I was younger, I probably had the entire Rockstar history memorized and would spring into a hearty speech about how "games aren't really the problem, it's the people", but you'd never really find me playing any of Rockstar's games; in an ironic reversal, I was just as fixated on the controversy of the material rather than the material itself. Of their entire catalog, Manhunt was the game that piqued my curiosity the most, since the very concept was so boiled down: you just kill people in gruesome ways, no morality tests, no philosophical questions. I played the first few levels when I was 13 or so, and thought I was a real scary edgelord for loving a game where brutality was so rewarded (guess what my favorite fighting games were), but I never really got far in it. I felt satisfied with the couple hours of exposure I got, and I think that feeling hasn't changed for me now, years later.

Manhunt lays its cards on the table early, and lets you know what you're getting into quite clearly: a dark, almost noiresque atmosphere, aided by the gritty PS2 visuals and clearly Carpenter-inspired soundtrack, and the sneering voice of Brian Cox cheering you on as you brutally murder the people in your way. For the first hour or so, it really is effective. The camera angles and quality of the Executions, along with the fluid mocap work, provides a grisly realism that works to unsettle even the most grizzled of horror vets. Combine that with some high-level sound design, and the end result is a spectacle of potently macabre entertainment, but it's not something that lasts.

As with most horror-adjacent media, exposure and desensitization are its Achille's heel. Not only is the arsenal of weapons surprisingly limited, a good third or more of that arsenal aren't available for Executions, and some of the weapons even reuse their Execution animations, which leads to even the most effective kills feeling dull after a couple levels of repeats. Unfortunately, rather than try to "up the ante" and make the game progressively more disturbing, it feels as though the developers completely throw in the towel somewhere around the third act, and turn the game into something more like Max Payne (sans bullet time) or even a "3D Hotline Miami"; the difficulty spikes, stealth is thrown to the wind, and guns become your primary tools against enemies, drying what remained of the atmosphere out completely, and turning it into a repetitive chore as the game gets closer to the finish line. And once you get to that finish line, is there a grand revelation waiting for you? Something that completely changes the context of the game, and perhaps even gives an "explanation" of the savage bloodthirst that you willingly took place in?

No. The antagonist dies, and the game ends with a brief news montage giving a slight bit of depth as to what happened, but never any concrete answers or commentary, which leads me to ask: what was the point? Was this a meta-commentary on how the elites are the real monsters, how police are just as cruel as the sadistic gangs you've been victim to, but society still finds a scapegoat to blame rather than looking at root causes? Is there perhaps an ironic connection between me, the player, never finding out any reasoning for why this all happened, leaving me in the same shoes as the protagonist? Could Rockstar be criticizing themselves, using the antagonist as an obvious stand-in for game developers who revel in the controversy garnered from subjecting the world to gruesome imagery?

Then I remember that this is a game that actively applauds you for performing more sadistic kills, with no cartoonish overexaggeration or a detached "silliness" to the bloodshed, just a jagged realism to everything you see. I believe there is no deeper meaning to be extracted from it. The game is sick, and I'm sick for playing it through to the end.

text by Thomas Callahan

⋆☆☆☆

“DOOR-BASHING, WINDOW-SMASHING VANDALISM.”

As somebody who has played Halo 2 online, I can tell you that the Xbox Live Headset is usually pretty terrifying. Women are demeaned on a medieval level. Prepubescent boys bark military jargon with gut-wrenching enthusiasm. Dead players are angry and they will let you know; racism and inflammatory bullstuff accumulates. I feel sleazy by proxy just listening to it all. These people are in my living room. At some point I'm bound to claw off my headset, banishing them out the door. Inevitably I'Il let them back in — listening to their vapid bile is almost as morbidly amusing as reading YouTube comments.



In Manhunt, you play as James Cash, a gore-loving serial killer lining up in death row. You bastard! When you escape, to the delight of journalists, you begin murdering people again — only this time, murder is your full-time job. No, you're not a hitman, you're a film star. You're employed by "The Director" to kill men in sadistic, needlessly complicated fashion. Each kill is videotaped with a shaky handheld camera and broadcast through a grainy filter. The footage is then spliced and edited into a series of snuff films.

Manhunt uses the Xbox Live Headset outside of an online context, and the result is more outright terrifying than any testosterone-fuelled internet-deathmatch banter could hope to be. We hear narration, a device criminally underused in videogames, through the headset, while all other sounds are emitted from television speakers. This maneuver reinforces the narration as separate from the in-game action; less detached and expository, more akin to a DVD's audio commentary. As you butcher and maim enemies, "The Director" chortles with uninhibited glee into your headset. To him, these illegal-voyeur-reality-HOT! death videos are captivating pornography — he's getting off, and uncomfortably close to your inner ear.

What kind of sick freak would buy tapes of real murders? Is there really an existing audience, an actual market? Are there others just like The Director, giggling rapturously at these senseless snuff films? Man, that’s hardly even a question. Of course there's an audience. There will always be an audience for depraved violence. For starters: you, the player. You the player bought Manhunt, a game documenting depraved violence in vivid detail; a game by that depraved studio Rockstar Games; a game created for depraved gamers just like you.

This is a damning portrayal of the videogame industry, where developers endlessly one-up each other, piling on the shock value for consumers endlessly craving more. Blame falls equally on the entertainers and the entertained. James Cash provides inspired violence for the camera — he is Rockstar's loathsome self-portrait — and The Director is a pastiche of you, the grinning spectator clamoring for more. What a mess. Manhunt sends up everyone. It's not preachy satire: it presents no escape from the gory supply and gory demand. Perhaps it's nothing more than an expression of videogame industry turmoil circa 2000. Either way, the whole enterprise is thick with despair. When I suffocate a man with a plastic bag and The Director chortles in my headset, his cruel delight and my instinctive satisfaction mirror each other.

And I don't like it. In fact, I find the parallel pretty hecking nihilistic. Pretty hecking patronizing.

Rockstar Games created Grand Theft Auto with the most earnest of intentions. They aimed to accommodate as many stray ideas as possible, without care or precision, in order to provide templates for more polished games to come (such as Bully, Crackdown and Dead Rising). They succeeded; the series' reckless ambition was and continues to be infectious. Somewhat regrettably, its explicit subject matter spawned lawsuits, activists, and sensationalist press. But that was mere tabloid opportunism, wasn't it?

Here comes the nigh-unwatchable navet: this controversy is treated by Manhunt as another stray idea of Grand Theft Auto's to be polished, a template to build upon.

That's not only tactless, it's, uh. What the hell's the point?

Manhunt is a pointless act of destruction. It flaunts the sickness of an industry and continues the sickness with knowing symbolism, providing more blood and sex, you sickos, and don't worry, we're sickos too. The Director is a sadist for enjoying violence; you're a sadist for enjoying violence because ha! you're still playing our violent videogame. Serial killer James Cash is forced to pump out more violence by The Director; us Grand Theft Auto developers are forced to pump out more videogame violence by you. This is not an anguished protest. It's an opportunistic tantrum. If everyone is guilty and accused, even the victims of the snuff films — yeah, they're hecking neo-Nazis — then what's the intent beneath the bleak, all-encompassing cynicism? More spotlight, more sales. So what if Manhunt can draw clever parallels; it drags its players, its developers and the public image of videogames a little further into a vague sludgy pit. Consider the mission revolving around a 300-pound mentally &^#$#ed man wielding a chainsaw. Or the anemic stealth engine, where tossing decapitated heads into distracting corners is the end-all answer to everything. Was Rockstar inspired to create this game as one giant mischievous heck You to the likes of Jack Thompson? If so, they've simply handed their opponents more ammunition. Was Manhunt intended to provoke discussion about the pitfalls of the medium? If so, Rockstar have provoked discussion from me: this review, where I give their noisy pitfall of a game a resounding half star.



As sheer horrific provocation, Manhunt succeeds. Yet underneath is dreary, methodical stealth, and underneath that is door-bashing window-smashing vandalism. None of it has purpose. A tinge of self-parody is undeniable, but it's a baseless, rabble-rousing plea for attention all the same, and the attention it received — frenzied 11:00 breaking-news drama — has subtly pushed videogames further away from respectability, further into the publicly scorned fringes that comics, wrestling and pornography call home.

Further still, now: Manhunt 2 has been banned in the UK. Nintendo and Sony, in an attempt to save face, are refusing to publish the sequel without some hefty censorship. The situation is all kinds of ridiculous. It brings to mind countless independent films forever silenced by their NC-17 ratings. I'm too drained to line up in defense of Manhunt 2, though, because judging by the adulatory PR — featuring necrophilia and castration — I doubt it will amount to anything greater than Grisly Unfriendly Action Utilizing Wiimote Stabbing Motions. I conclude now, having finished Manhunt (it ends up ditching all symbolism and resorting to trite cops vs. robbers), that the good folks at Rockstar have been playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto. Here they snag the attention of mass media the same way giddy "sandbox-gamers" snag the attention of cops: with desperate, drunken destruction demanding immediate response. Run over that pedestrian! Ah, a policeman: a dead policeman! Twenty innocent bystanders and five unsuspecting hookers later, C.J. is under fire from the US Army. And they're using hecking helicopters, dude! Slash them down! And now Manhunt is getting blamed for homicides, dude! And now the UK government is throwing us into the bonfire — we might have too many stars to wriggle out of this one, dude! Do it again! This has gotta be the biggest adrenaline rush we've had since we free-climbed the Mayan ruins!