Five Nights at Freddy's 2

20 hours playing this game it feels im totally crazy with Golden Freddy mode, Scott Cawthon is really genius!

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.

Thre's no doubt about that FNAF 2 is probably one of the best FNAF games in the series. It has more animatronics and new challenging to conquer, especially with no doors. This game does have hidden minigames to give in more depth of the FNAF lore, but it can only happen if you get a game over screen. As fun as this game is, the jumpscares does feel a bit repetitive. What I love about FNAF jumpscares is that it'll be unexpected if you're not careful, and this game does that too. However, when you keep seeing the same animations, it gets more frustrating rather than scare. I'm not gonna lie, I can see why this game was hyped and it came out the same year as the first game (CRAZY). I do personally enjoy this more than the first, but as the shock factor goes, the first game takes the cake.

FNaF 2 came out around 10 weeks after the first game, which is understandable after how good FNaF 1 did. And even though I still really enjoy this game, I don't love it on the same level as everyone else.

Before we get into my flaws with the game, let's talk about my positives. I really like the increase of animatronics and the different mechanics in terms of the mask and the security office without doors. Also, the custom night is awesome, and the 20 mode is insane. So why don't I consider this to be the masterpiece that FNaF fans hail it as? The music box. It's an interesting mechanic for sure, and it adds a lot of stress to the experience, but it also makes every other camera in the game completely irrelevant. All you have to do is check the vents in your office and put on the mask when someone enters the room. The cameras are literally just there because there can't just be one camera. The first game also struggled with keeping every camera relevant, but it wasn't to the level of FNaF 2. I think that Scott Cawthon should've taken a little more time to make the animatronics more unlike each other so that the cameras had more relevance. It might seem like I'm hating on this game, but I'm not. It's still a great installment that I recommend.

The sequel of Scott Cawthon's big hit and considered one of the best games in the franchise, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 was released a few months after the first game (with a gap of less than two months), innovating in gameplay and bringing a narrative that proves to be much deeper and more disturbing than the one presented in the previous game. With many more Animatronics and a gameplay of greater attention and complexity, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 fixes some of the flaws of its predecessor (despite maintaining the same graphic and sound quality) and opens the door to countless theories speculated by fans.

With the same concept as the previous game, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 brings us a new narrative and "plays" with the chronology of the canon events (moments from the Original Story that are true) in the history of this universe. In this game, the new protagonist is hired to work as a Night Guard for five nights (from Midnight to 6am) in the new pizzeria of the Freddy Fazbear's Pizza chain, a pizzeria with a new brand image and more colourful animatronics, with better technology and suitable for all ages. Unlike the pizzeria we met in the previous game, here we find a new, clean and functioning pizzeria (but with the same vulnerability problems as the previous game, where all the Animatronics try to attack the protagonist). Instead of security doors for our own protection, we now have a Freddy mask (which serves to fool the Animatronics' facial recognition intelligence and thus prevent the attack), a flashlight (to illuminate the corridor in front of the office and mobilise some Animatronics) and a music box (which can never stop playing, whatever the cost). We still have the presence of the video surveillance system and the "Phone Guy" instructor, who calls every night to narrate events that are happening at the moment and further feed the narrative, which is now revealed through four mini-games that are randomly unlocked whenever the player is attacked by an Animatronic. These mini-games turn out to be metaphorical ways of narrating the story to the player in a creative way, other than through text or dialogue.

Despite all the changes mentioned and the variety of new Animatronics (in addition to the four main ones we already know), the game continues to offer an experience that can become tiring in the long run for the player and the level of terror remains in the spectrum of light suspense and jumpscares, already popular in the previous game. Like its predecessor, after completing the "Story Mode" (which consists of five nights), the player can still do the 6th Night and then play the "Custom Night Mode", the only difference being the identity of the protagonist and the extreme level of difficulty. So, all I have to say is that Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is an excellent sequel that manages to surpass the success of its predecessor, but the light level of terror doesn't satiate the search for "fright" and despair that some horror game fans are looking for. It still has the "Achilles heel" of repetitive gameplay, but it's still fun and challenging. Finally, I'll end this review by giving the game a rating of 7.5/10.