Eventually, Danny and Leo make their way through the ground-level S&M club complete with naked pole-dancers and a variety of total freaks to an underground section where the real debauchery unfolds. In locked rooms that blanked a long corridor, psychopaths mutilate and murder victims in a number of disgusting fashions. In one cut-scene, a masked killer uses a power saw to slice into a man's bulging belly, as the victim lies helplessly strapped to a table. In another, a hunter prepares to electrocute a separate prisoner. Manhunt 2's new M rating does not appear to have any bearing on these sequences, as they look and play exactly as they did when we first saw them so many months ago. Indeed, the majority of main gameplay functions are intact, violence, gore and all. If Danny beats a hunter with a mace, the carnage will play out uncensored, and blood will splatter onto the main character's clothes.
But there have been some unfortunate content omissions, too. When we first wrote about Manhunt 2, we referenced a particularly nasty death sequence, in which Danny could use a pair of pliers to literally rip the testicles off a hunter. That murder has been completed removed from the updated build of the game. Not a big deal for us, as it only amounts to one kill out of dozens. Danny can still saw into the heads of enemies, or bludgeon them with a blunt object, or stab them, or use a syringe on them, or even use the environments to take them out. In one sequence, Danny uses a sewer cap to decapitate a hunter, at which point the enemy's body fell into the sewer hole. [...] The biggest and most disappointing change relates to the major death strikes. When Danny sneaks up on an enemy, gamers can hold the A button down, at which point they will be given the option to pick from three different murder animations (on Wii, they get to act them out with Nintendo's motion-sensitive controllers). In the AO-rated build of Manhunt 2, we could clearly see these over-the-top and horrific animations. In the M-rated version, Rockstar has added both an extreme blur effect and in most cases darkened the graphics so that it is nearly impossible to make any sense of what is going on. Players will be able to see character movement, blood splatters, and sometimes they may catch a glimpse of an identifiable action (for example, Danny jamming nails into the legs of a chair-bound opponent), but mostly it's guesswork - a garbled, motiony mess that's far less satisfying. This truth is doubly unfortunate because both everything else is unchanged and because these death strikes are what gamers will want to work toward; they're the pay off for a job well done, but now the pay off is not nearly as rewarding.