“Welcome to Hell” - Jeez Louise, they weren’t kidding with a name like that!

Years ago when I was in my teens, I practically scrubbed Filefront clean of every demo I could get my hands on, one of them was a Demo for Liquidator 2 and by golly was it short! However, its weapon selection was pretty rad to me at the time and while I later went on to collect Slavjank on the cheap, I could never properly find a copy of Liquidator 2 to put on my shelf.

And now, a good 17 or so years later I find a whole slew of Slavjank has launched onto the steam with little warning, with Liquidator 2 among them!

So, after all this time, I can finally say my inability to nab a physical copy of Liquidator 2 saved myself a lot of unnecessary suffering…

Alright, let’s be nice. Let’s get the good stuff out of the way.

It never crashed! It’s also got a delightfully cheesy pre-rendered intro cutscene, the guns sound good to use, the enemies can gib quite spectacularly in all their T-rated glory and that pistol is a stroke of genius on sound feedback with such a satisfying reload! And of course, some of the levels have some charming antiquation as it appears every single aspect of them was handcrafted with old-fashioned brushwork, giving me delightful Counter-Strike 1.6 vibes here and there!

They are also crafted with sheer, unadulterated anger, guided by the hands of a psychopath who hates you and will relish at every opportunity to waste your time with some of the most elaborately crafted back-tracking I have ever experienced!

Okay, let’s go all in on the bad.

Story is over and done with after the intro CGI cutscene. You hear a woman over the announcement system during the Tutorial and come across absolutely nobody else throughout the next 3 stages, so I have no clue what the games store-page was saying with a “Progressive character & story development” or what they were implying with a “Rich variely (???) of characters & super charged power-ups.”

There sure as hell aren’t any damn powerups, either! And just what the hell is an “Automatic gameplay adjustment system”??

Were they implying the appalling enemy respawns was a feature to be proud of?!?

Most enemy encounters are in tight corridors against a motley crew of skeletons, assorted slime bro’s who have been hitting the gym and a clustered assortment of demons with some levels offering a few unique mooks here and there with an unhinged spawning system that seems to pop them into certain arena’s in waves 3 to 5 times before their numbers dwindle as you traverse a seemingly open-ended metroidvanian level divided up between loading zones while you scour the map searching for switches or runes to open doors and progress to an exit portal to escape. All the while you are given all the weapons right off the bat, giving you zero progression as all ammo replenishment is done via secret ammo caches and the occasional dead soldier with an endlessly spawning array of potions to refill your health and armor.

And sometimes they just zap your health instead!

It seems as if the level designers had trouble arranging enemy and item distribution and decided to just drop more ammo then you could ever hope to run out of, making the game a total cakewalk until the final stage where the enemy numbers and damage become nigh impenetrable, coupled with labyrinthine architecture, obtuse progression and practically endless backtracking intentionally done to pad out the game significantly longer then it had any right to be.

And hell, If it wasn’t for the great help of a handy full-play by MudPuppit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlAuAdwQ42I&lc=Ugy8FXV-u9qbCU3goQN4AaABAg.ACgiqn_Xya4ACglYEm_Y_3 I definitely wouldn’t have ever beaten this slog. Shoutout to a fellow soldier in the Liquidator 2 Trenches!

So why the hell did I subject myself to all this?

I guess I’m just a sucker for gibbing legions of skeletons, it was practically a feature since taking them down by conventional means would have them pop right back up as bone-naked or turning into a skelly-spider! And by golly, some of the reloads were satisfying to listen to as I slowly but surely progressed through this maze of pain.

Perhaps I should be studied in a lab somewhere. This was definitely not worth it as I was granted no final boss on the last level nor another CGI cutscene to elaborate on just what the hell I was doing for the last 8 hours…

Even to seasoned Slavjank enjoyers, this one should most certainly be avoided. Welcome to hell, Indeed!