The Escapists 2
In Need of Redemption
A strong relationship sometimes takes sacrifices. Maybe you give up hanging out with your friends in order to watch trite romantic comedies with your loved one. Maybe you relinquish your loyal dog because you have nothing else for the blood ritual. Maybe you have to suddenly move for your spouse’s new job. In my relationship, my partner sacrificed free will and our future second-born child to make me happy. In turn, I agreed to purchase and play a game with her which looked utterly boring.
The Escapists 2 (E2) is not my genre of game, nor is it good enough to entice me to give the genre a second glance (unlike Mario + Rabbids). When I purchased E2, I recognized that it would go on my docket for potential reviews in the future, and a small part of me worried that my low expectations would ultimately result in a biased score. Fortunately for me, by the time Player Two and I had completed the first prison, we were both tired of the formula. If a game based on tedious resource management and routine can’t appeal to two neurotic, monotony-loving gamers, it deserves whatever paltry score I spit out.
What is it?
Your goal is simple: escape by any means possible. As a prisoner, you begin with nothing: no weapons, no clear plan, and no voting rights. Prisons, however, are known for their endless opportunities, and only your imagination and the game’s design can limit how you get to freedom. Dig under the barbed wire fence, cut through it, mail your friend and yourself to another place, construct a plane, start a riot, hire lawyers and sue the place for cruel and unusual punishment. Whatever your plan is, you will spend your first few days of imprisonment scoping out your cage.
The actual steps to escaping take a little more work. Every day, you have to follow the prison’s routines. You check in for meals, work, showers, roll call, and other activities in order to placate the guards. Miss one or get caught breaking the rules, and the security level increases, bringing more prison staff, guard dogs, or a full-scale lockdown. Once you get the schedule down, you can freely move about the prisons, raiding fellow prisoners’ belongings for resources or doing favors for them in exchange for money and improved relationships. Using the materials you buy or steal, you can build shovels, key cards, weapons, and other implements to make your escape possible.
The prisons, themselves, range from your typical cement fortresses to P.O.W. camps to oil rigs. If you’re looking for something a little more fast-paced, transport missions give you a set time limit, forcing you to escape from some sort of moving vehicle before you reach your privately-owned criminal hell. As we all know, serving time can get pretty lonely, so you can rope in a fellow convict in local split-screen play or start a gang of up to four people online. Need a little competition? Fight against your friends in Versus Mode to see who can escape first and live life on the lam, filled with paranoia and a constant sense of unease.
What’s good?
- If you can get behind the basic concept, you could be kept busy for a life sentence, especially if you’re close to dying. You get ten different maps, each more complex than the last. Add multiple ways to escape and a speed-running component, and you have reason to become a repeat offender.
- The transport missions offer a much-needed dose of adrenaline. Gone are the tedious routines and tiresome resource harvesting, allowing you to focus on the best part of E2: creating a plan and executing it.
- You can name all the guards and prisoners however you like. Do you find your family insufferable? Name all the guards after them and symbolize your constrained life in video-game form. Have you been keeping a hit list of all your enemies? Take out your passive aggression by making them prisoners. Have the maturity of a five-year-old? Just name everyone after curse words and toilet humor like I did and enjoy hours of entertainment.
What’s bad?
- Prison is boring. A large chunk of the game is spent rummaging through other prisoners’ belongings to find the right materials needed to support your escape attempt. The other chunk of E2 is hurrying from point A to point B, whether it is to follow the prison’s routine, accomplish a fetch quest, or complete a job (AKA minigame). Your actual escape attempt takes maybe ten minutes, and if you fail, it’s back to square one in most cases.
- Much like the US prison system, E2 is filled with issues. Combat feels sloppy and inaccurate despite its simplicity. Interacting with context-sensitive objects is imprecise and infuriating (especially when in the middle of an escape). Split-screen multiplayer stutters whenever a player opens a menu, and your field of vision is drastically reduced. Add E2’s tendency to outright crash, and you’ll lose all motivation to escape your cage.
- The NPCs are dull creatures. All guards and inmates theoretically have a positive or negative opinion of you, but the consequences of either are negligible. Unless you’re bullying a single individual repeatedly, you won’t need to worry about winning any popularity contests. Even if you do anger a guard, as soon as you shove money down his gullet, you become the best of buds.
What’s the verdict?
In my egocentric world, boring me is a capital offense, and the Escapists 2 is guilty on all counts. As I played through it, I stopped worrying about giving it an unfairly low score. Instead, I began to worry if I could muster enough willpower to play it long enough to justify a review. Admittedly, the dull and unintuitive gameplay drove me off before I could experiment with the final few maps, and I had no desire to try out alternate escapes. Call me a lazy slug, but I can’t recommend this to anyone outside of those who have already bought the game and came here just to argue with my score. Don’t do crimes, kids. It’s better to be scared straight than deal with the Escapists 2.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 5.5
- Time Played: Over 15 hours
- Number of Players: 1-2 (local); 1-4 (online)
- Games Like It on Switch: Minecraft, Payday 2