The first Five Nights at Freddy's could accurately be described as bare bones. Featuring a simplistic premise, the cult classic indie horror title made use of some fairly basic management mechanics to keep players on edge. It gained quite a large following because of that despite its small scale, and left the door wide open for one-man developer Scott Cawthon to capitalize on all of its no doubt at least somewhat surprisingly high success with a follow-up.
The thing about sequels though is that they're expected to expand and go deeper with the concept in order to improve and not sell consumers the exact same product twice. As a result, FNaF 2 doubles the amount of everything from how many animatronics there are to deal with, the security blanket resources you must ensure don't run out, to even the number of locations that need to be monitored. I must praise the inventiveness of many of these newly introduced functions and ideas, but having to stay on top of so much calls to mind the old saying 'less is more' as while undeniably more interesting and demanding the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't as much fun as what we got before. Likely because of how quickly it came out...
Released a mere three months(!!!) after its predecessor, there are some obvious issues with the balancing in this game. Even when using the most effective strategy for success, the increase in scale and therefore potential variables causes you to regularly end up in situations where you're unavoidably screwed due to the RNG. The challenge never feels insurmountable, but the tension and fear quickly gives way to tedium and irritation in the later stages forcing me to wonder if this wouldn't have been better off had it spent more time in development to alleviate some of its frustrating nature.
There are still aspects that make this worth a look for fans of the original. For example, this is where that "lore" you'll always hear the Five Nights community talking about started to be built through the prequel/origin tale on display here. The writing is a bit too cryptic and vague to fully figure out what exactly the dude calling you at the beginning of every level is talking about without doing some digging online, but for an experience clearly not tailored around storytelling it's impressive how it manages to kick off a larger narrative that so many of the series' faithfuls have latched onto. I'm also once again blown away by how all of this was designed by a single person and works as well as it does given how the quantity of factors at play got upped in such a brief period. However, the fact that it's simply not as enjoyable prevents me from being able to view it as anything more than a big disappointment. It's not awful and I respect a large portion of what it set out to do, but consequently I can't really consider myself a fan of it like I could the prior entry.
6.9/10
The thing about sequels though is that they're expected to expand and go deeper with the concept in order to improve and not sell consumers the exact same product twice. As a result, FNaF 2 doubles the amount of everything from how many animatronics there are to deal with, the security blanket resources you must ensure don't run out, to even the number of locations that need to be monitored. I must praise the inventiveness of many of these newly introduced functions and ideas, but having to stay on top of so much calls to mind the old saying 'less is more' as while undeniably more interesting and demanding the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't as much fun as what we got before. Likely because of how quickly it came out...
Released a mere three months(!!!) after its predecessor, there are some obvious issues with the balancing in this game. Even when using the most effective strategy for success, the increase in scale and therefore potential variables causes you to regularly end up in situations where you're unavoidably screwed due to the RNG. The challenge never feels insurmountable, but the tension and fear quickly gives way to tedium and irritation in the later stages forcing me to wonder if this wouldn't have been better off had it spent more time in development to alleviate some of its frustrating nature.
There are still aspects that make this worth a look for fans of the original. For example, this is where that "lore" you'll always hear the Five Nights community talking about started to be built through the prequel/origin tale on display here. The writing is a bit too cryptic and vague to fully figure out what exactly the dude calling you at the beginning of every level is talking about without doing some digging online, but for an experience clearly not tailored around storytelling it's impressive how it manages to kick off a larger narrative that so many of the series' faithfuls have latched onto. I'm also once again blown away by how all of this was designed by a single person and works as well as it does given how the quantity of factors at play got upped in such a brief period. However, the fact that it's simply not as enjoyable prevents me from being able to view it as anything more than a big disappointment. It's not awful and I respect a large portion of what it set out to do, but consequently I can't really consider myself a fan of it like I could the prior entry.
6.9/10
2 Comments
Yea
Lollycakeman
1 year ago