We’ll just go ahead and cut to the chase for those of you who’ve been following the development of Manhunt 2: we’ve seen the infamous bit where a guy gets his testicles and one of his vertebrae removed by a pair of wire cutters, and yes, it’s nasty.

Not as nasty as the scene playing out in your head right now - the actual gore is limited to spraying blood and horrible fleshy wrenching noises - but nasty nonetheless.

We’ve also seen a pen broken off in a man’s throat, a sex-hotel receptionist strangled with his own phone and a hitman’s head splattered by a shotgun at point-blank range. And once Manhunt 2 hits this summer, you’ll be able to see all this stuff for yourself, as often as you like - assuming schlocky, wince-inducing gore is what you like to see, of course.

If it isn’t, then Manhunt 2 won’t do much for you. Like the first game, it’s a deeply creepy stealth-horror game that’ll have you sneaking through the shadows, trying to get the drop on armed “hunters” before they can kill you. The action mostly revolves around creeping up behind your enemies and murdering them with a quick, brutal execution; the longer you can stand close behind them undetected, the more brutal the kill. If you’re seen, you’ll have to put up a fight, and unless you’re heavily armed you probably won’t last long. Lucky for you, then, that standing in shadowy places makes you practically invisible to the roving killers that populate each level.

There’s more to Manhunt 2 than murder, of course. The story this time involves Dr. Daniel Lamb, a relatively harmless family man and scientist working for a neurological weapons program called the Pickman Project. When the project’s funding is cut, Dr. Lamb volunteers himself as a test subject and is predictably driven insane.

Cut ahead to six years later, when a freak power outage gives Lamb, now a deeply disturbed amnesiac, the chance to escape from the Pickman Project’s secret asylum. With only vague memories to go on, he’s hungry for answers, but the project’s sent out hired killers to make sure he doesn’t get them. Unless he wants to die without ever understanding what happened to him, Lamb (along with his sociopathic new buddy, Leo Kasper) will have to kill his way to the truth.

Like the first game, Manhunt 2 is set almost exclusively in places where no sane human being would ever want to set foot, let alone creep around in the shadows. The asylum in which the game starts is some 19th century horror that looks more like a dungeon than a place of mental healing, and it’s filled with things like inmates who try to piss on you and orderlies beating up other escapees. It’s also packed with single-use weapons - such as syringes and pens - that can be used to gruesome effect on the orderlies and murderous patients patrolling the hallways. These items can also help out in a fight if you’re discovered, although they’ll break after the first few hits you land, forcing you to rely on your fists afterward.

The fistfights look cool and all, but the stealth kills are the real draw here. Like in the first Manhunt, each of the weapons you’ll find have three distinct levels of brutality, depending on how long you can lurk behind your intended victim. You’re free to administer a quick, instant kill, but if you wait a few seconds before attacking, you’ll get to see something a little more unsettling - like your victim getting his trachea ripped out by wire cutters (again, not quite as gruesome as it sounds). Wait even longer, and you’ll pull off a brutal torture-kill, like the nutsackectomy we described earlier.

To help you pull off these killings, you’ll be able to carry around four weapons at a time, including axes, shards of glass, plastic bags and even one or two guns, which can now be used for close-up, head-exploding executions. You won’t always need a weapon, though; sometimes, there’ll be a skull icon on your onscreen radar, which means you’ll be able put something in the environment - like a phone or a fuse box - to lethal use. Each of these has just one level of brutality, but rest assured it’ll be horrific enough to make gorehounds happy.

If you want to stay alive long enough to see all those interesting kills, you’ll need to stay hidden, preferably in the shadows. Like in the first Manhunt, standing in dark areas make you undetectable by enemies, but they’re not the guaranteed safe zones they used to be. Hunters will occasionally wander right into them, and if that happens, you’ll need to rapidly hit a sequence of buttons or they’ll drag you out and start shooting.

You’ll also need to keep an eye on how much noise you’re making - which goes double if you’re using a headset (supported only by the PS2 version, sadly), as it’ll pick up anything you say. Good if you want to lure a hunter close to you, but bad if you’re trying to hide. If you absolutely need to be noisy - by breaking a window, let’s say - it’s better to time it with nearby ambient noises, like some guy hammering on a wall.

Speaking of which, you won’t always be up against kill-or-be-killed hunters in Manhunt 2. The places Lamb creeps around in, while eerie, aren’t the abandoned killzones of the first Manhunt, and as such they’ve got a few relatively innocent people - workmen and janitors, for instance - strolling through them. These guys got killed off rapidly in the demo we watched, but it’s possible you might not have to murder them to get ahead. Then again, you’ll be playing as a criminally insane slasher, so to look for ways to be compassionate is to miss the point.

Manhunt 2 is scheduled to hit simultaneously on the Wii, PS2 and PSP this summer, and publisher Rockstar says that all three editions will be more or less identical. The PS2 version will support headsets and the Wii version features motion-sensitive controls (which we didn’t get to see), but in terms of visuals and content, they’ll be the same. Whatever the case, our hopes are high; the first Manhunt was one of the most vile, disturbing things we’ve ever seen, and it looks as though the sequel will delve even deeper into blood-spurting spectacle. Assuming the actual gameplay is as well-designed as the digital gore, Manhunt 2 already looks like a low-fi horror classic.

Originally from GamesRadar