This is by far the weirdest GTA title I've ever touched. Ranging from the setting, to the missions and characters or even the promotional art, it was a weird leap from the first game but somehow a welcome one.
Grand Theft Auto 2 is the sequel to the top-down frenetic crime simulator from 1997, and this one doesn't really stray away from its roots, in paper, it's pretty much just more 2D Universe GTA, this time however it takes place in a bit more of a gritty setting as you roam the streets of the crime-ridden Anywhere City, a big metropolis consisting of various districts and different gangs per area, and gangs are the name of the game since this game revolves primarily around them.
Now, instead of just picking up whatever mission from a payphone, you're gonna have to choose one path and affiliate yourself with one gang or another to get their missions, the better the trust you have with the gangs' leader the better the prizes, and you need to rack up those points to move on to the next districts (in pure 2D GTA fashion). This makes for a fun game of testing out and getting a feel for all gangs and their missions to choose a favorite one to go with, or to have protection against police and stuff like that. Granted it's a pretty basic feature that is interesting at best, since the missions are still all very same-y and it gets boring after a while, but it's cool to see that they would later on expand on something similar with the turf wars in San Andreas.
I was able to play with both mouse and keyboard controls and with a radar mod akin to 3D Universe GTA, and that alone made it so much more bearable than the first game, albeit the arcade system of getting money to get out of the district sucks pretty bad, but it's somewhat more playable and manageable here now that there's also ways to save your progress and the fact that you don't lose the opportunity to take on jobs/missions as soon as you fail them, you can always just retry them or go ham and kill your own dudes to go and hang out with the other gang.
By the way, the dude you play as in this game is Claude Speed, not affiliated with Claude from future games (GTA3/GTA:SA), and the fact that everyone kinda fooled themselves into thinking Speed was his last name in GTA3 when they probably looked it up and it was referring to GTA2 Claude is something that I found kinda funny
Grand Theft Auto 2 is the sequel to the top-down frenetic crime simulator from 1997, and this one doesn't really stray away from its roots, in paper, it's pretty much just more 2D Universe GTA, this time however it takes place in a bit more of a gritty setting as you roam the streets of the crime-ridden Anywhere City, a big metropolis consisting of various districts and different gangs per area, and gangs are the name of the game since this game revolves primarily around them.
Now, instead of just picking up whatever mission from a payphone, you're gonna have to choose one path and affiliate yourself with one gang or another to get their missions, the better the trust you have with the gangs' leader the better the prizes, and you need to rack up those points to move on to the next districts (in pure 2D GTA fashion). This makes for a fun game of testing out and getting a feel for all gangs and their missions to choose a favorite one to go with, or to have protection against police and stuff like that. Granted it's a pretty basic feature that is interesting at best, since the missions are still all very same-y and it gets boring after a while, but it's cool to see that they would later on expand on something similar with the turf wars in San Andreas.
I was able to play with both mouse and keyboard controls and with a radar mod akin to 3D Universe GTA, and that alone made it so much more bearable than the first game, albeit the arcade system of getting money to get out of the district sucks pretty bad, but it's somewhat more playable and manageable here now that there's also ways to save your progress and the fact that you don't lose the opportunity to take on jobs/missions as soon as you fail them, you can always just retry them or go ham and kill your own dudes to go and hang out with the other gang.