The Escapists 2

The Escapists 2 is an ingenious, multi-layered clockwork sandbox that offers you a wide range of routes to freedom. Its tough demands and myriad competing systems can lead to frustration, but a winning sense of humour and knock-about fun always brings you back for another jailbreak attempt.

The scope is impressive, though, as a large amount of variables make The Escapists 2 a dense, packed game. That all becomes too overwhelming, sadly. It just feels like a niche product that a small group of people that adore the concept are going to sink a ton of hours into while many others just bounce off of it. For an open sandbox game that relies on the user to enjoy the experience utilizing their imagination, the journey to the goal just isn’t enjoyable enough.

Ranging from the simplistic to the absurd, the Escapist 2 offers a great variety of ways one could escape from prison. Scoping out a new prison for its vulnerabilities and formulating a plan to carry out is a great time, but getting to those thrilling moments of misadventures are often plagued with days of scavenging, looking for those one or two materials I desperately needed and as the tedium began to set in, I wasn’t looking for a way to escape from the prison but rather from this cycle of boring, repetitive gameplay.