Five Nights at Freddy's 2

NOTE: This review applies to the Xbox One and PC versions. The game is also available on PlayStation 4, Switch, iOS, and Android.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is the sequel to the once-polarizing-now-hideously-dated Five Nights at Freddy's. Let's be honest, the only thing this game series really had going for it was its mysterious lore. Here, it's somewhat improved upon, but unfortunately, very few have ever seen the full game story without looking up cutscenes on YouTube. Do you know why that is? Because playing this game is like subjecting yourself to a Russian roulette with five bullets that never really kills you. If you get shot, you have to start over and over and over again until the gun decides to let you win.

Let's start with the biggest reason why only the top 1% of players have actually finished this game; the difficulty in this game is extreme. When I say extreme, I'm talking borderline Dark Souls level, and not in a fun, challenging, rewarding way; more like a cheap, BS, luck-based way. The game's not so bad when you start out, but once you get to night 3, it's a combination of a highly repetitive strategy that only truly works when the game decides to let it work. Just like the first game, your survival is randomly determined. Sometimes, the animatronics will get you, even if you've done everything to stave them off. Sometimes, the music box will stop working five seconds or more early. Sometimes, an animatronic will get you seconds after you begin a level. There is no real strategy for survival. If you beat custom night on 20/20/20/20 once, all that means is you got lucky once. Try beating it again with the same strategy, chances are, you'll die anyway. I don't think I have ever died so frequently in a video game before. This takes a great toll on the horror properties, too, because you'll see the exact same animatronic plunging towards you so many times, you may get a little jolt the first few times, but it gets old really fast. Jumpscares are not real horror. What is your reward for completing all five nights? In-game, it's just a paltry star on the menu. On Xbox One and PC, it's a lot of gamerscore. If you're a huge achievement hunter, this is a much grander reward than what you get in-game.

The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some things that were improved upon compared to the previous game, but there is one major mechanic that drags the whole experience to obnoxious and tiresome. I do like that you're not just opening and closing doors to preserve power. In fact, there is no power meter, so you don't have to worry about waring anything down. The designs for the toy animatronics and the withered ones are pretty nicely done, even if the graphics are way behind in what should be a 2014 PC game. There are also these minigames that sort of give a vague idea what happened to the animatronics in a sort of Atari 2600 style, which is nice since it's pretty clear this game takes place over 30 years ago. Surprisingly enough, the Xbox One version of the game, I think, has even better controls than the PC version. Pressing a button on an Xbox controller to operate the lights, check the camera, or put on the Freddy mask is far less clunky and more intuitive than swinging your mouse cursor around and hoping you have the proper steadiness and reflexes. However, as I said before, there is one huge, glaring flaw in the gameplay that prevents it from being an overall improvement from the first game: the music box. This pain in the rear always demands you to wind it up endlessly, or else this weird Marinette comes and kills you. At first, you may have to do it only one full spin every 30 seconds. Once you get to night four, though, you have to spin that handle endlessly, and if it seems like something's about to kill you, you have only five seconds to put on that Freddy mask long enough to make it go away, then quickly go back to the music box camera to continue turning. Because your survival is randomly determined, those animatronics may decide to stay long enough for the music box to die, and you might as well just restart the game. Of course, there's also Balloon Boy. While he's not as annoying as the music box, this brat gives you only a split second to put that mask on before he decides to steal your batteries, making your flashlight unusable. Unless you're really good at taking wild guesses as to where the animatronics are coming from and when, again, you may as well just start over.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a sequel to a game that had interesting lore, and it is sort of expanded in this game, but it's not worth trying to survive this rage-inducing nightmare. Unless you don't want the stress to ultimately eat you alive, it may be best to cheat this game, or just don't play it at all. I normally do not suggest cheating in order to beat a game, but considering this game cheats constantly, finding ways to bypass these psychotic man-eating robots is not only justifiable, but also absolutely needed.