Manhunt 2 - hands-on with the game you might never play

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We get up to our elbows in gore-soaked torture-horror insanity

Sometimes, collecting heads serves a different purpose. In level "Sexual Deviants" (an S&M club secretly run by the Pickman Project), for example, we had to decapitate some bondage-masked creep named Father Fist (the club's loud music muffled the noise) and then hold his dead face up to a door slat so that the guard behind it would let us in.

What lay behind that door, incidentally, was the best part of the game we've seen so far: a horrific VIP dungeon, directly inspired by the movie Hostel, in which freaks in business suits and animal masks torture hapless victims to death. It's all being observed by the Pickman Project, of course, in a bid to recruit sadistic candidates for its create-the-perfect-killer-program. Guess who gets to ruin everyone's fun?

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Another of the levels we got to try, "Best Friends," was less disturbing but no less gruesome. A playable flashback triggered when Danny looks at a photograph of a fellow researcher, the stage is some sort of dockside warehouse in which you'll be able to play as Danny's sidekick, Leo Kasper. Leo starts the level weaponless, with a bunch of armed goons (presumably Pickman Project hunters) about to bust in. We were able to turn on a big industrial press, which masked any noise we made as we ran for the shadows, and also provided the means for head-crushing environmental executions when a couple of hunters wandered too close to the rollers.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.