Bush Whacker 2 is a massively multiplayer online game released by Codename Entertainment in April 2012. The game was previously hosted on game websites like Armor Games, Facebook Gameroom, and Kongregate before moving to its own launcher on December 31, 2020.
The game, which is a sequel to Bush Whacker, focuses on the player character, the Bush Whacker, and their adventures and escapades throughout the land of Bushwhackia as they hunt down the King's daughter, the Princess, and help out the locals along the way by, well, cutting down bushes.
This game provides examples of:
- 15 Puzzle: Opening the Creepy Tower requires solving this puzzle with images of the tower's entrance. There's another one inside that's bigger, but optional, and will reward you with access to a chest upon completion.
- Added Alliterative Appeal: The names for the overworld quests are typically alliterative, typically following the format of "(object) for (name that starts with the same letter as the object)".
- All Animals Are Dogs: Inverted. At one point in the "Dog Days of Summer" event, Nate states that since cats like empty cardboard boxes, dogs should as well.
- The All-Solving Hammer: While there is some variety to the gameplay, such as various puzzles or trivia quizzes, the vast majority of what needs to be done in Bushwhackia is accomplished by whacking bushes. Finding items? Whack bushes. Finding missing people or searching for specific wild animals? Whack bushes until you find them then whack them. Fighting a boss battle? Whack bushes to make weak points appear for whacking. Even most of the puzzles require whacking bushes to find the parts for solving them, most prominently the field puzzles that advance area progress.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: A good portion of rewards for completing quests or gathering enough requisite currency by completing quests to buy them is various outfit pieces and weapons to customize your look.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: The biggest portion of rewards for doing anything, including quests, buyables, area collectables, and hundred-percenting events is stuff to decorate your various personal areas with, especially your main house.
- Anachronism Stew: Bushwhackia may appear to be a medieval-fantasy world at first glance, but it has an abundance of modern-world and sci-fi objects such as teleportation pads, computers, paint tubes, buses, you name it.
- Author Avatar: During the game's annual Anniversary Event, the developers of the game, along with other Codename Entertainment employees, can be seen celebrating in The Commons.
- The Beastmaster: Finding, buying, or raising pets and mounts to train for various passive bonuses is a prominent mechanic, with one mount and one pet allowed at a time. There are also a huge variety of "creature" types to raise and train, ranging from more everyday companions like dogs and horses to more fantastical ones like a bowl of sentient mashed potatoes that gets around with a balloon and living boats that generate water to cross land.
- Big Bad: From the moment you reach the Cloudland quest hub, the Red Man, a Devil-like man with horns and red skin, becomes the overarching antagonist spreading chaos through every area you travel across, with the plot from then on being to fix the damage he's causing and hopefully, one day, stop him for good.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The questline for The Base Camp centers on a yeti that is preventing a squad of rescuers from reaching the Avalanche Zone.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The Princess (or at least when she has her hat on) easily fits this. Once you rescue the princess from the evil Ice Wizard in The Mountain Peak, she seems grateful to have been saved by you and seems to lead you through a shortcut to the south, but, throughout The Terrifying Traverse, she repeatedly blames you for causing numerous obstacles to block the way, and by the end of the area,she exposes herself as a trickster and runs off to wreak havoc across Bushwhackia. However, this only applies when she is wearing her hat.
- Book Ends: The Crusaders limited-time quest has only been run twice in the history of events for the game, with the first being to announce the release of Crusaders of the Lost Idols, and the second being a year after "sun-setting" it as a "complete" game.
- Character Overlap: Several of the characters in the game, such as the Bush Whacker, Jim the Lumberjack, Investigator Kaine, and the Dragon siblings were used as part of the starting roster for Crusaders of the Lost Idols, since Codename Entertainment developed both. As the game continued receiving updates this later ended up getting done back by having crusaders from that game act as NPCs in later areas of this one, such as Death Puddle giving a quest in the Dead Pools area of the Salt Desert.
- Chest Monster: Played with. One of the obtainable pet companions is the Mimic, which is a chest with teeth, red eyes and canid-like legs. Ellesandra the alchemist has one named Chesty, who also acts like a dog.
- Clockwork Creature: Pelorus Gryphi, partly (if not completely) robotic gryphons that serve a role in the Explorer's League quest-line.
- Crazy-Prepared: In the last quest of the Mystery of the Evil Hat quest line, Kaine has disarmed all 19 of the explosive devices Mrs. Robinson was forced to lay. Just as all three of you are breathing a sigh of relief, however... the mastermind reveals a twist.The Princess' Hat: Muwahahahaha! You think you have won, do you? Well, I hid an extra detonator and stick of dynamite inside myself! I may not get the Commons, but I'll take you and this little schoolhouse with me!
- Die, Chair, Die!: As the gameplay heavily centers on cutting down bushes and occasionally other objects like rocks and monsters to get things like gold or quest items, the entire game is essentially built on both this and Rewarding Vandalism.
- Fishing Minigame: All across Bushwackia, you can find fishing holes for starting up a timing-based minigame to catch something, whether it be treasures that add to your gold count, fish that replenish a small amount of your energy, or even decorations. This minigame is also one where Fishing for Sole is something you want the most, as many quests require fishing up items, and every individual fishing hole has at least one unique decoration item to pull for.
- The Hat Makes the Man: The Princess' hat makes her behave like a royal brat, as seen when she loses it after being kidnapped (again) in The Desert City Gate and becomes innocent. As it turns out, this applies to the hat itself, as it possesses Mrs. Robinson and threatens to destroy the Commons in the Kaine case unlocked right after completing Agrabush's final area.
- Hub City: The Commons acts as this, offering a number of daily quests and growing in size as the Bush Whacker levels up and advances through Bushwhackia. There are also various other smaller hub cities located in each of the areas formerly counted as "end-game" content before each new big-scale update, starting with the Cloud King's Castle, that each have a special quest-line revolving around the related area
- Red Herring: The Ice Wizard's five treasure chests. Left one? Ice. Slightly less left one? Ice. Gold chest in the middle? Ice, and Nate giving up. Slightly less right one? Still full of ice. The one on the far right that isn't even golden? An Ice Gnome for your ranch, and a cool Ice Wizard's Sceptre for your sword slot.
- Secret Level: Each of the main areas in the game contain a hidden area known as a Secret Bonus Area, which require following not-so-obvious paths or solving puzzles in order to gain access to. These areas have a field puzzle for you to collect the pieces to and solve in order to get trinkets, gnomes, customization items and more.
- Shout-Out: Lots and lots and lots of them. The Bushwhacker 2 Wiki has an article
dedicated to documenting them. Now has its own subpage. - Temporary Online Content: There are a large number of decorations, mounts, companions, and other collectables that are only available for a limited time, whether through events or deals. While most limited-time collectables become available for purchase again at some point, whether through getting added to a permanent store or being able to be bought with Bush Bucks from a pet sale or secondary event shop that sells items from previous runs of that event, certain items like the event ribbons that raise your energy limit or the Monster Compendium pages for the Creature Collector mini-event can't be bought, thus making them permanently unobtainable if you miss out on them.
- Tropey, Come Home: Some quests in the game, such as the possible daily quest for the General Store where you are tasked with finding a cat named Mittens or having to round up one of Aaron's four pets after they run off during the Valentine's Event, have you whack bushes until a missing pet appears, which you then whack to catch or send on its way home.
- Tropical Island Adventure: Amicus Isle, which acts as one of the game's multiplayer areas, is a tropical island that the player can visit. There is also the third island, the Tropical Islands.
- You Bastard!: Parodied with the quest-log for the Anniversary Event quest "Rebushestation", which calls Bush Whacker a monster for all the helpless bushes he has"murdered" traveling across Bushwhackia, and requests you find sproutlings to heal the land... which like everything else requires you to whack more bushes to get said sproutlings.
- You Wake Up on a Beach: In the game's intro, the Bush Whacker washes up on Bushwhackia's Tutorial Shore after a severe thunderstorm overtook their ship and another ship belonging to a gang of pirates they were battling to rescue the Princess.
