It’s 3am and your neighbours are partying again. You’ve finally grown sick of it and have decided to take matters into your own hands to silence the party forever.
Party Hard is a game all about a guy just trying to get some sleep. After his neighbour’s constant all-night partying, he’s finally had enough and has decided to just go kill them all. This urge to want to kill all of them starts to grow out of control and he goes across the USA, crashing parties along the way. In order to help him take down these parties you will need to use some devious tricks.
The subject matter of Party Hard is something that is a bit close to me, but not to the point of actually wanting to go out and kill. When I was younger I was pretty bad at having my music a bit too loud, and now that I’m older, my neighbour’s tendencies to be extremely loud frustrates me to no end. I was finally able to get the time to play through the game and I can say that I enjoyed my time playing this game.
Your primary objective within each level of Party Hard is to kill every single person at that particular party. You’ll need to take care not to get caught though as if someone spots you and you aren’t able to successfully blend in, you’ll be arrested and forced to restart the entire level. When Bouncers are introduced to the game (which is fairly quickly), you’ll need to up your stealth game in order to ensure everyone’s death.
Trying to avoid getting caught was a bit hit and miss for me. I liked the added element of stealth to all my actions that I did. What I didn’t like was when I would get spotted by someone who wasn’t even near, or by someone just rounding the corner, and would become unable to even blend in and forced to fail.
In order to achieve your glorious murder in Party Hard, you’ll need to use the elements in the area you’re in along with what tools you can find. There will almost always be food for you to poison, something that can easily rack up the kills. You have to be exceptionally careful about where you stand when people are dying to the poison though, since if someone keels over near you, another party goer will likely point at you and say you’re the murderer (well, you are, but that’s beside the point).
Aside from poisoning food, there will be some unique things to the levels. Some of the levels will contain a horse (or a zebra) which you can use to kick those behind it. The nice thing about the horse is people tend not to blame you for it, so it’s very easy to get away with a lot this way. There’s also events such as throwing people to the sharks or off a roof (which you’d think would draw more attention to the party). These events also tend not to get caught, and are perfect ways for you to off sleeping party goers.
Using your surroundings to kill people isn’t always perfect unfortunately. In one particular level near the start, one of the objects you can use is a display car. You can send this car into a horde of unsuspecting people who are in line at the Bouncer, taking out them and said Bouncer. The problem with this is that the game tends to lag if you start trying to kill too many people all at once, and you’ll often find that half of the line was left untouched. Another point in which the game will majorly lag is if you shortcircuit the dance floor in the first rooftop level, though thankfully this does seem to actually hit everyone who was on it at the time.
You need to be careful with some of your mass killing too. When someone spots a body, they will almost always run to the nearest phone to call the cops. If you catch too many cops in traps that you’ve set to go off, the FBI will show up. The FBI are not very fun to deal with – they’ll actually stick around in a level, you can’t directly kill them (or cops, for that matter), and will catch you if they see you at all.
One of the things that got somewhat annoying in Party Hard was the music. Every single level has the same basic beat to it, and it’ll get old fairly fast. A wider variety of music would’ve been fantastic, especially if the choices were reflective of the location and type of party it was. Sorry, I just don’t exactly see that kind of music being played at a Halloween Party in Wyoming, but what do I know in regards to music played at parties I guess.
If you enjoy stealth-puzzle types of games then you will probably enjoy Party Hard. While one level in the batch did feel fairly useless to have even existed, the rest of the levels were decently challenging. Be prepared for a bit of bullshit in the final level of the main campaign. I won’t spoil what you need to do there, but just be thorough in what you do if you find yourself stuck. I do wish that there was a bit more variety in the music, and the lag spots if you killed too many people at once were somewhat frustrating. I did overall enjoy the game though, and can definitely highly recommend it to others.
Party Hard Review Score
4/5
Party Hard is available now for Steam, XBox One, and PS4.
I would like to thank Evolve PR for providing me with a PS4 key for use with this review.