Indie Corner: Party Hard

Imagine this. It is Friday and finally you are home from work. You felt like you were squeezed out by the Hulk and you just want to get some peace and quiet. But suddenly your dear neighbor decides to celebrate the weekend in a completely different way. Namely a party. And they will party. PARTY HARD.

Party Hard is a stealth assassination game much like Hitman meets Hotline Miami. So as you can tell this game is about killing. You have a certain number of people that you will have to kill. There are many ways to kill your targets like poisoning, pushing them into certain objects or the standard stabbing. The actual story behind this is that the protagonist wanted some peace and quiet. The neighbors decided to have a party so you decide to crash into that party and kill everyone.

Have you ever wanted to feel how it is to walk into a party in the ‘80s? Well this game lets you experience just that. The startup screen is like the façade of a club where your parents (or for the more mature readers, yourself) could have been and the music just tops it off. The music is typical for the ‘80s. But since these days there is a nostalgia towards the ‘80s, maybe it is just Vaporwave made by an artist today.

First thing you notice are the graphics. They are beautifully nostalgic. The pixelated graphics and the general look add up to the ‘80s theme.

So the game starts from a top down perspective and it stays that way. You don’t control the viewing camera. The problem here is that sometimes you lose track of your character but since this game isn’t packed with action, it does not matter. You also don’t need a controller or mouse for this game.

You only use about 10 buttons. But like in the Hitman games, things are happening all the time. There are some opportunities where you will have to wait some time.

The first time I started a level I had some strange encounters. For instance the police that starts killing some of your targets because they had drugs. There was also this strange trench coated dude that started killing people. Which is nice because this game is hard. In my first level I had to kill around 50 people. And imagine that you can barely chase anyone (you can sprint, but only like a turtle sprint) when they have seen you and that you can’t attack police men. But it is still fun. It is challenging. Also the levels change from time to time so you have different opportunities.

A really fun thing (though it is only for streamers) is that this game has very good twitch compatibility. When you are streaming this game, your watchers can do stuff to you. Like send police, a swat team that kind of stuff. It occurs to me that more and more games are doing this. But I think this is a very fun evolution and maybe the next step in game streaming. But this game in general is kind to content creators. They even have a YouTuber mode.

If you finally have completed all the levels you can still play a DLC called high crimes.

Or you can even play in the steam workshop. You can play levels made by the community which dramatically increases the play time.

I think this game tries to capture the soul of the 70’s and 80’s. Except for the murders probably. I also saw some Easter eggs. For instance I saw characters from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

DLC:

The DLC is a bit different. Here you have an actual objective. For instance the first scenario is that you have to kill a drug dealer. There are a few scenario’s that are all some kind of crimes. These are levels for the more experienced players because these levels are even harder. But basically it is just more levels to complete.

I really like this game. It is quick, challenging and fun and I really like the ‘80s theme. The only thing that I think is a bit lame is that you have to start all over again when you die. Surely when you have 50 targets. Or maybe there is just a thing that I didn’t see. Nevertheless it is a really nice game which is worth every penny.

Score: 4.5 out of 5