Manhunt was a great, outstanding game. It stood out with its dark, psychological theme and was packed with violence and gore, creating an experience that was both intense and unforgettable. From the moment you start playing, the game's atmosphere is relentlessly grim, drawing you into its world of horror and madness.

One of the most striking aspects of Manhunt is its brutal and varied execution mechanics. Killing enemies with a plastic bag or any available weapon, from a simple brick to a roaring chainsaw, always feels intensely visceral. It just never gets old.
The developers included three types of executions for every weapon, each more gruesome than the last, ensuring that the game pushed the boundaries of violence in video games. This approach didn't come without consequences, as Manhunt was banned in several countries due to its extreme content.
Nowadays I don't think it would be the same case, there's even more violent games out there.
Stealth is a core element of the gameplay, adding a constant layer of tension. Moving through the game’s environments, the shadows became your best friend, offering the only respite from the ever-present danger. The need for careful planning and precise execution made each encounter nerve-wracking, enhancing the overall suspenseful experience.

The soundtrack of Manhunt significantly contributed to its unnerving and unsettling atmosphere. It was meticulously crafted to be haunting and disturbing, amplifying the tension to the point where it felt almost tangible. The music, combined with the game's stealth mechanics, created an ambiance so thick with suspense that you could almost cut it with a knife.
The themes "Deliverance" and "Fuelled By Hate" are the ones that stand out the most in this game.
The Credits theme is also quite touching because you spend the whole game facing off against some of the worst people that the human race has to offer and at the very end you get hit with this song that reminds you there is also good in the world. It helps you take your mind off all the gore and carnage you went through.
The game also featured some great boss fights that were both challenging and memorable. These encounters often required strategic thinking and skill, making them a standout aspect of the gameplay.
The Piggsy character is still one of my favorite villains in gaming.

Despite its dark themes and intense gameplay, what makes Manhunt truly special is its grounding in reality. There are no supernatural elements to fall back on; it's just pure horror and madness driven by human actions. This focus on realistic, human-driven horror makes the game even more chilling and impactful.
I’ve finished Manhunt about five times, and I still feel the urge to play through it again. Its unique blend of stealth, violence, and psychological horror creates an experience that is hard to find in other games.

To wrap it up, I can say that Manhunt is a remarkable game that excels in delivering a dark, intense, and unnerving experience. The combination of stealth mechanics, brutal violence, and psychological horror makes it a standout title in the world of video games. Despite the controversy surrounding its content, or perhaps because of it, Manhunt continues to draw players back, offering an experience that is both deeply disturbing and profoundly engaging.

Cinematic only as peak Rockstar could do. Much as Max Payne is inspired by John Woo and GTA Vice City was by Scarface, Manhunt is clearly inspired by the gritty horror movies like Texas Chainsaw and the New French Extremity movement (which at the time was starting to find it's footing), and wears it like a glove throughout. Some of the best stealth gameplay you can find for this era, also gets brutally hard in the final stretch. Takes a bit for the story to get going, but once it does, it's a smart relentless reverse-slasher, a self-statement on violence in media and a gritty horror-crime thriller with a brilliant musical score, although more story on it's bones would have been recommended. Heard 2 has more story, so can't wait to get around to that soon

Atmospheric dread candy. Not quite the Edgelord driven mindless horror you're thinking (not this one at least) but it finds a pulse on a reverse-slasher cold-blooded thrills. Ingeniously harsh on difficulty to a slight degree of realism, tailors you to engage on stealth takedowns than face-to-face combats since you won't go far against crowds of goons, with a highly janky and inconvenient combat for you to absolutely praise thy heavens at the sight of firearms.
Gunplay is clunky but ensures a challenging hardship given how receiving gunfire drops your health significantly, facing off mobs of goons to increasingly more powerful firing squads face an equal amount of difficulty as you'd drop dead as easily as your enemies. Bombastic action doesn't mesh too well with this antiquated cover shooter shtick but it grooves to grindhouse horror messiness by the fantastically bonkers finale where you navel-gaze towards squads of tactical forces.
The takedown system is a neat way to face the player's fascination towards violence- It's not truly necessary to perform them as vicious as they're sold, and yet, these avoid monotony to the player's gameplay (at least until you realize there's just one animation for each gravity of execution). I kept finding amusement at the simplicity of a plastic bag.
It's an imperfect and janky action-adventure of sorts but i truly admire the asphyxiating tension and nihilistic premise as a framework for a morbidly Noir quasi-survivor horror exploitation film playing you as the hero. Carcer City stands as some of the most inhospitable worldbuildings ever imaginable by Rockstar Games right next to hospital spawnpoints on GTA.

I am not sure why I like this game so much. The gameplay is fine at the beginning, but turns into garbage when guns are introduced. The story has an interesting premise but gets odd and loses the plot as it goes on. The executions are fun but you end up seeing the same ones constantly if you are going for high scores. But, for some reason, I have bought this game three times and have beat it a decent amount as well. Worth trying as a relic of Rockstar Games' past, but most people will stop having fun pretty quickly.

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.

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.

What becomes a violent and interesting horror stealth game about being a death row inmate reborn as a merciless killer for the pleasure of a snuff filmmaker is a less-than-mediocre third person shooter... from the PS2 era. It's really a shame in my opinion, I don't hate that this game has guns, but some levels (mainly the end levels when shit gets real) put you through this linear shooting spree that just doesn't feel good. You take turns shooting each other and just pray you have enough health to endure it. Other than this and a few other minor nitpicks, It's a great game.

Manhunt has simply became one of my favorite games of all time.

The brutal violence, gritty world and the atmosphere of anarchy, blood and chaos is one of a kind, this is the only other game that I had that feeling of 'disgust' (?) I don't know if that is the right word, but this game has that "B-Movie"/Something you should not be watching or playing type of stuff, in which I love. And the only other game that I have ever played that gave me this feel, was Kane and Lynch 2.

Manhunt tells the tale of Cash, a man that was 'killed' and now, must participate in a sick game of mouse and cat, or how I liked to call it, a game of mouse and mouse.

In Carcer City, a little town forgotten by the US, crime is routine and with that, comes opportunity. Cash is hunted and the entire gameplay has this unique type of adrenaline, where you MUST NOT, screw up, otherwise you are dead. You must think fast, act like an animal, hide against the large groups and strike when you can, make the Hunters be your prey, hunting them down with anything that you have, be it plastic bags, hammers, sickles, crowbars, glass shards, anything.
Huge kudos goes for the voice acting team aswell, this game's chases would never hit the same without hearing a entire pack of 6 psychos screaming at the top of their lungs while trying to stab you.

The game has a very awesome gameplay loop too, while making us question whether or not we are enjoying the executions, or if we simply are trying to get the highest score or the biggest excuse "we are fighting for survival".
It doesn't matter after all, everything it's just a movie that others will pay to watch, just like the player paid for the game to enjoy the "show". Manhunt has a discussion of violence that is (in my opinion) right up there with Hotline Miami 1/2 and No More Heroes, although Manhunt is quite underlooked... Alongside it's influence in stealth games, MGS and Splinter Cell always had this thing of you using stealth in a way to get to your objective in a subtle yet 'clean' way... The old MGS games for instance, rewards the player for going non lethal in many of it's installments and if you try to "fight back" against the enemies you simply waste your time.... In Manhunt however, you need to kill, stealth isn't just a way to get around large groups, but a weapon in itself.

This is a product of it's time, something we are never going to see again, so please, if you have the opportunity, play this game.

While some of my favorites like Dead by Daylight, Resident Evil 7, and Red Dead Redemption II make this game's violence pale in comparison, I can absolutely see how influential this game was on later video games' ability to have that gore in them at all. It's brutal, realistic, and extremely antisocial, the stealth executions shot to resemble a home movie to challenge the player's own reason for enjoying the graphics: Are we no better than Starkweather himself, controlling Cash and forcing him to slaughter other guys like it was going out of style? Maybe we're not, but the game wasn't bad. The aforementioned stealth executions got rather repetitive and the AI felt extremely janky at times, but there's a fun try, die, try again gameplay that reminds me a little of later stuff like Hotline Miami and the use of light and shadow as a stealth mechanic feels really advanced for the PS2. Overall it's more a neat piece of video game history than it is a great video game, and it features all of the violent, angry atmosphere that one could hope for from the early 2000s.