Receiver 2 (2020)

There are 2 very frustrating things with this game (artificial difficulty):

1. You need to replay a previous level if you die. (Tedious, waste of time)
2. You get too little ammo on levels 3+ (It's a gun game, and stealth is not fun here)

So to save you from frustration, use two cheats:

1. The second you drop dead, type INSIGHT to prevent you from dropping a level. (Using this cheat while you die saves you 30 seconds of slow screen fade animations)
2. When you run out of ammo, type IDKFA

I really wanted to give this game low rating for the frustrations of stupid artificial "difficulty". Making me replay easy levels or sneak without ammo is not hard, it's boring.

I wish I had the idea of using cheats before I wasted 5 hours replaying levels 1-2.

But I'll give it 4 stars, because we gotta encourage games with innovative gameplay mechanics, like this one.

Receiver 2 was a chance to build upon the original issues of the game - harsh punishment for mistakes, poor optimization, and tedious tape finding. Despite improvements in some areas the game seems to have doubled down on what made the original so aggravating.

Receiver 2 pretty much remakes the plot of the original, as you are a chosen "Receiver" that must gather special tapes to slowly awake out of some reality and fight a sinister Threat. The plot seems profound but dips into fairly predictable idealism mixed with worrying amounts of paranoia and delusion. Throughout floppy disks and tapes that the player will find you'll get plenty of surface level meanderings on gun management, what is not real, and being patient for challenges.

One will definitely have to have patience for challenges, as the tedious and RNG-intense tape finding of the original has returned. While there are some unique mechanics to help assist the process (chants whenever a tape is nearby, shooting tapes) as well as sinister "Threat" tapes that force the player to shoot themselves if they have a loaded gun, it comes down to chance as to if it'll be a breeze or a slog. Most of the time, it's a slog.

There are a wealth more guns to handle, but most of them handle fairly similarly since they are all handguns. Handy tutorial messages help the player manage jammed guns, double feed, carefully reloading a revolver, and other such things that amount to "not being able to reload in the heat of battle". Players will also have to be extra careful to sheathe/draw guns carefully as tapping the button will end up shooting the player by accident, along with running with the gun also shooting the player.

Enemies are pretty much the same as the original, with some added turret variations and security cameras to spice up the drone action. They get tedious very quickly but given the more intricate construction of these enemies you'll have more opportunities to accidentally shoot an important part that will either disengage them, hold them in place, or hack them in order to get some extra ammo.

This is where performance of your computer is essential, as anything other than buttery smooth performance will make handling things such as hacking and shooting near impossible. Being a recent game I had to cling to the lowest settings to be able to play the game properly, which was a shame since the lighting that plays off a variety of modern and drab interiors looked nicer this time around.

The straw that really breaks the camel's back, however, is the ranking system. While getting 11 tapes in a single run in the original was an extremely tedious challenge, Receiver 2 ups the ante by spacing 3-5 tape challenges across five ranks. Make a single mistake, and you'll have to repeat the lower rank until you inevitably get booted to the lowest rank in a game over. Receiver 2 is a tense and stealthy challenge in the first few hours but the combination of wildly random setups paired with hostile and unforgiving progression make this an incredibly hard sell. What could've been a chance to interact with the intricacies of the gun simulation in tighter and more well designed environments end up with repetitions of tedium and frustration.

After playing the initial game (and completing it as it was rather short) I immediately picked up the next caliber and went to work. Receiver 2 hit me with substantially more recoil than I had anticipated.
Introduction Message

In Receiver 2 we see a game heavily based around the first. The maps, the weapons, the enemies, the mentally ill stuff and concepts are all the same (for the most part) there is a bit more variation in the enemies and the maps (they look a whole lot nicer) but the main thing going on here is the guns, there are substantially more of them and for the most part all but two of them are good choices to have in the game because they are very popular lines of firearms with many designs directly based on.
Everything is basically fleshed out a whole lot more into what feels like a proper (albeit unorthodox and quirky) FPS.

The meat of this game is familiarizing yourself with a weapon and 'improving' in the sense that you go into these fights with a robot which while somewhat tactical (you wait for the right moment to go around the corner and place one well timed shot when the camera isn't facing you) sometimes you'll have to act fast, or you'll have to learn how to reload. I found that the game aspect of this works pretty well and is unique, but also very different. This game plays a bit slow, and consists of you slowly moving through a level in what is basically that of a stealth game. You're looking for tell-tale signs of the enemy in the form of their blue lights, whirring rotors. You have no advantage at longer distances or out in the open, so sometimes you'll avoid them or seek to find an alternative route which lets you ambush them from behind. This kind of play style makes it feel like it leans more heavily into a stealth game and a Puzzle-solving First Person game, rather than an FPS. But it's incredibly satisfying to not fuck up such situations and you feel like a legit ninja at just doing basic things. Perhaps the closest comparison would be Budget Cuts, which is pretty much exactly how this plays (minus the technicals on the firearms)

The game shines with it's technical simulation of the guns though. It's the chief merit to playing it and it's pretty remarkable what they actually did simulate. Probably the main one is guns going off by accident (which when they do always scares the hell out of me!) I think nowadays It's common that when game devs 'get serious' they go to a range and shoot some machine guns or buy something to put in the game and handle them in their office to make sure that they 'look right' or feel right. But I've no doubt that the developer of this game took that one farther XD. They surely own these guns or has used them a lot because the way they actually tend to malfunction is also remarkably in the game. The colt 45 will smokestack and double feed at higher rates, but other weapons will have their own ailments such as improperly seated magazines or not chambering the next round. If you actually have any of the weapons in the game you'll notice what i'm talking about (and will enjoy it) Also the accidents, it's so good lol

Some tapes are amusing, some are educational, some are quite helpful, some are mental/cult-like rants and some tapes are actually... well you'll see, when you're ready for the truth.

Receiver 2 is a very mental world. This could be polarizing for some people who might choose to play it because it mixes it's realism in with Bizarre Delusion. There are tons of logs and tapes which as you progress in the game just get weirder and weirder. It makes the game uncomfortable but also, quite interesting.

It's a bizarre phildickian kind of world where you somehow slip into a 'fake reality' and must collect these tapes to 'awaken.' For a game that isn't actually violent, there are subtle implications between what you are doing and what you are listening to (as well as a few game details such as your reflection) that make it quite disturbing.... While it was never hinted or implied, shooting these robots I couldn't help but begin to wonder if maybe I was shooting people and something in my perception was masking it. It's a strange dystopian and immersive atmosphere and I felt like Deckard jumping across rooftops as I hunt for the next replicant, only to wonder at some point if I might myself be one.

It might indeed feed into your own delusions... So take the disclaimer message seriously!

In the end I found myself loving this game despite its flaws and annoyances (and difficulty) because it's just so different and I appreciate the direction it's going in (and I am curious about all the lore and tapes to be read and listened to). One can hope that they will make a Receiver 3 at some point and it will be even better and will be a VR game, (because the idea seem perfect for it) until then this will be something i'll probably come back to time to time to re-familiarize myself with these weapons.

The game is an endless game and it's the kind of game many players would get tired of in minutes, and a game many people should not play because it might 'trigger' those mentally ill. But if you like games like world of guns, stealth games, or like the idea of a disturbing game in which firearms safety is paramount because you never know when that gun might go off because you're in a simulation where probability is stacked against you and accidents DO HAPPEN, and when they happen they will HAPPEN TO YOU, then you might get your mileage out of this one. XD

I found it to be nowhere near as smooth as what the demos show (I was getting 60 FPS fine in some spots but in the trouble spots i'd got 30-40 FPS with the 'quality settings' and could improve that a bit to 40-50 FPS by cranking it all down.) and kept my graphics down to a minimum because reaction time and frames was just too important and I was playing it in steamVR desktop mode which tends to magnify the effect. It seems that some areas trigger these slow downs, as you move around it loads the world beyond it, so the solution is to be patient and wait it out somewhat or just find another route. That's the main flaw against this game. the optimization was a problem in the first as well, but it's a bit better in this one but still notable and annoying. That and it's still a little bit of a lightweight in terms of content (especially at it's price.)

Because it's just such a freaking hard game to begin with and learning one gun to the next is a major challenge (as well as a needless distraction) It would also be nice if there were ways to actually keep a particular weapon so you might master it (instead of just be randomly assign whatever you unlock) Because you cannot do this without suiciding you'll lose rank and that forced you to use whatever gun you start the level with until you succeed or fail. Losing rank is really crappy because it means you don't have access to the higher tier tapes. (This seems to simulate the effect of being a ninja cultist: You must stay alive to access the better tapes, you must access the better tapes to stay alive!)

Another neat thing I found myself wanting from the framerate issues was to have simulation for the effects of actual combat (time dilation bullet time) when enemies you are pointing your gun at detect you and a shock response crash after no enemies detect you where you can't really do anything other than shake and have a high potential for accidents. The cheat code for bullet time slowmo is in the game anyway so it seems that they could have found a way to make it a feature like that I would think.