Is working the night shift in a pizzeria as a security guard for $120 a week with five animatronics coming to kill you your dream job? If that’s the case, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” will exceed your expectations!
As the sequel to the popular game “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” features not one, not two, not three, but 11 homicidal animatronics for 2.75 times the fun. The cast includes all the old animatronics (Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, Freddy and Golden Freddy) from the original game, upgraded versions of the previous animatronics, a balloon boy and a puppet. To make things all the more terrifying, there are now three entrances the animatronics can sneak in through: a hallway in front, a vent on the right and another on the left.
The player must stay alive from 12 p.m. to 6 a.m., or six to eight minutes in real time.
Best of all, those pesky doors that the last guard used to keep the animatronics out are gone, so I got more close encounters with Freddy and his friends.
Fortunately, I was given an empty Freddy Fazbear helmet to fool the animatronics, so I got to play a game of peekaboo with my new friends. It would act as a disguise if one of my “friends” snuck in. But Foxy and the puppet knew better; they could see past the helmet.
Foxy was relatively easy to deal with, since all I had to do was shine my flashlight at him. However, the puppet took up quite a bit of my focus.
To keep the puppet at bay, I had to keep remotely winding a jukebox on my monitor. There is a certain sense of panic I felt as I tended to the jukebox with my eyes glued to the monitor while multiple animatronics on my left, right and front could be staring into my soul.
I would repeatedly put my monitor down to find Chica, Freddy or a faceless Bonnie that horrifyingly resembled the Terminator right in front of my desk. To make things more creepy, the red lights shining from where Bonnie’s eyes were supposed to be would blink.
At that point, I would only have a split second to react.
My heart would pound right as I placed my helmet on. The lights in the office would flicker and I could either be safe or I could be killed for being too late, which I would find out when my helmet was lifted off to find an animatronic reaching for me.
If I have any constructive criticism to offer Scott Cawthon, the developer, it would be the incorporation of a survival game mode. This mode would require the player to survive as long as possible.
Cawthon has kept the core of what made the prequel so great: simplicity, urgency, cameras and jump scares. At the same time, he has added more urgency, increased the need for fast reflexes and scarier animatronics.
If you ever want some of that family friendly fun found at Chucky Cheese’s without the “family” and “friendly” parts, get on Steam and download a copy of “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.”