The Humble Store is just finishing up its "Build your own Tiny Build Bundle" sale, and this is one of five games I picked up on it this morning. I'd heard it was a little janky mechanically back at launch, so I decided to wait on it. I'm not sure if it actually plays any better now, but it ended up being quite fun :D . The main game took me about 3 hours, and the remix stages (kinda harder versions half of the main 12, but not exactly) took me about another 2. For the $3 I paid for it in the bundle, I more than got my money's worth. (I tried the free Castlevania-parody-ish DLC, but that level is long and horrible, so I just said screw-it pretty quickly XP).

Party Hard is about a guy who just CAN'T SLEEP because of the parties going on next door, so he gets up, gets a mask and knife, and goes on a murder spree to let himself get some peace and quiet. Apparently this is a country-wide crusade for peace and quiet, as the 12 stages take you from San Francisco to Miami, but the narrative really isn't the most important thing here. The narrative is told through stills coupled with voice-over between stages, and it's nice window-dressing for a little extra context flavor, but it's nothing great (and really doesn't have to be :P ).

The game is a top-down stealth-action game to try and kill all the party's attendees without getting arrested by the police. You can do this in a manner of ways ranging from setting environmental traps (like turning on a car's engine to flatten a huge queue of people), using items you find in the stage (like a stun-bomb to knock out a bunch of party-goers dancing in a big group), or good old-fashioned marching in with a knife and going crazy (although that's pretty dangerous XP). If a party-goer spots a dead body, they'll go call the police, but if you're far enough away they'll just assume it's some random dead person I guess, because the cop comes, puts it in a body bag, and leaves. There is no attempted reason to try and explain why people keep partying with body-bags everywhere, but it's just a video game at the end of the day, isn't it. Regardless, if they spot you, the cop will come after you (until he gets bored and gives up, but he'll be more persistent every time he's called for you), so using your limited sprinting to get out of the way before you're seen is key!

The game's 12 stages (although some of the main 12 are already "remixes" of one another, aside from the extra 7 remix stages) could technically be completed in a couple minutes a piece, but that's if you're both VERY good and VERY lucky. Each stage will probably take you at least a try or two because of either getting lost keeping track of everything important, or because you don't get very good trap-RNG. Each stage has a randomized series of traps that can be present in it, to a punch-bowl that can be poisoned to a horse you can frighten to kick people in the face to a speaker system you can make explode. Given that the game does give you a score at the end, it's a little odd that it has these randomized elements, as some make each level FAR easier to complete than if they weren't there. The score attack element really clashes with these RNG elements, although I'm not one for score attack stuff, so making the stages a little different each time was a fun bit of challenge.

Verdict: Recommended. It's not the best 2D action-stealth game on Steam, but it's a damn good one. At an MSRP of $15 normally, such a short game is going to be a difficult sell to most people. If you can get it for $3 like I did on sale, then it's an easy recommendation, but a lot of my hesitation to Party Hard comes down to how much you value time/money in your games. It's a tiiiiny bit buggy here and there, but any I ran into were always in my favor, so I didn't mind :P . It does have local co-op (which I didn't get a chance to try) and Twitch-integration (the chat can vote on things to fuck you over with :P ), but it's a hard M-rated game, so it's not really a family game for most people. Nevertheless, it's a fun way to spend an afternoon (home alone with no kids, anyhow)

I was glad to get this game and the screenshots were certainly what I expected of the game. You play as a man who snaps and becomes a serial killer, hunting down people at different party locations.

The game is a lot of fun and many hours of play available thanks to the replayability when you unlock different characters and not to mention the many different maps created by the community for more endless fun.

It would've been very easy for this game to have no story, but it does and it's a very interesting story narrative too with a fascinating twist at the end, but even then, the game has not ended as they have alternative versions of missions you've visited with either a minor change or massive changes such as a survival against a zombie attack, a casino with really heavy security and even a few unique maps set in space.

I'd highly recommend this game as there is a real element to strategy with environmental kills (no different from the Hitman Series) and keep yourself a distance from the victims as you may get accused of murder, even if you didn't cause that person's death and it was something else programmed in the game.