After leaving a negative review for the DLC of this game, it's only fair I give a positive review for Party Hard 2 itself. Because the game really deserves it. I truly had a great time with it on a hung-over 1st of January (and weeks after that)

Just like Party Hard 1, you get to play as a serial killer bent on crashing parties and murdering party-goers. And that without getting caught. It's basically a top-down sneaker where you'll have to rely on your wits, timing and creativity to take out people unseen.

The second installment improves on nearly inspect of the first game: the levels are bigger, more zoomed in, the graphics are improved, animations are better, lots more dastardly ways to eliminate people, level layout is improved with several ways to reach a goal, bigger crowds and most importantly: contrary to just "kill all", the objectives are a lot more varied as well. You even get secret, optional objectives, like blow up all X, kill all people wearing Y, do this in that particular way, ... This adds a puzzle element to the game.

Completing objectives adds to XP bars that, when reaching certain thresholds, will award extra items in the next game. So if you did good in one level, you might find an extra weapon in the next one.

You finally can hold multiple objects as well, like a knife and a Molotov cocktail and alcohol etc. The game never does explain anything though, so you have to figure out everything out yourself. Only by trial and error (or looking up a guide) will you learn that you can create balloons to launch someone in the air, poison drinks in various ways or create your own Molotov's by combining items.

After playing Party Hard 2 to completion, I found it actually hard to go back to the first game because it lacks all this polish and those quality-of-life improvements of the second game.

The difficulty is still high but maybe a tad beyond the difficulty of the first game, because you now have a lot more possibilities.

I did encounter a few bugs though. In my 30 hours of gaming, I met about 5 bugged encounters in the base game that forced me to restart the level. Note that those 30 hours include the DLC, which is far more buggier.

However, I don’t consider these bugs a real problem: please take into account that you'll probably restart each level 40 or 50 times, because you screwed up something or could do better, so a handful of restarts due to bugs is not too bad.

For example:

"Right, I go left in that alley, shiv the first guy, sprint forward and push the second one into the fan."

"Oh crap, the second guy turned around just after I stabbed guy number 1. Meh, I'll just restart."

"Oh crap, now the first guy walked away before I could stab him. I could wait but ... nah, restart."

"I murdered them both but didn't get to drag away the first body in time. Hmm, looks I'll have to take out guy number 3 first before taking care of 1 and 2. Restart."

"Oh shoot, guy number 4 will always hear me if I drag number 3 away. I'll restart and next time start from right with numbers 4 and 5."

"OK, that strategy obviously is not going to work. How about I just walk in through the back and start with poisoning the punch?"

Etc. etc. This game actually plays closer to Commandos than anything else.

I didn't encounter any crashes, but found the game a lot more demanding that the first one. Especially your CPU and RAM are put to the test, so consider that your potato computer with beefy GPU might not be able to run it without constant crashes. I played on i7 with 32 gig RAM, but with an ancient HD5870 and didn't have any problems though.

There are some other negatives things to say as well:

First of all, the game does feature some boss fights. These are really out of place in a game like this. Everything and everyone is one-hit-kill, including you. Then suddenly the game introduces a level where a meatsack is thrown at you, one that requires dozens of hits. Especially the first boss was tiresome in that respect, the others are OK (but still annoying).

Second, there is a degree of randomness that is frustrating. Your victims in particular just wander around aimlessly and will turn around for no good reason just when you're sneaking by them for example. This takes away some of the strategy, because rather than timing you're dependent on luck.

I should add that, while this randomness is frustrating, it is also the type of frustration that is not necessarily bad. At the time of playing it was frustrating, sure, but looking back at it I realise that it is just the nature of the game.

B.t.w. item drops are randomized as well but I actually like that and consider it a positive thing, as it forces you to keep thinking creatively instead of always repeating a strategy.

Third and I’m really sorry to say it, but there are only a handful of music tracks and they really start getting repetitive after a while. I mean ... after 30 hours I can't bear to hear those tunes anymore, which is really unfortunate because the music is actually great.