YMMV / Receiver 2

• Audience-Alienating Ending: For some, the final ending feels like a thrown together at the last minute ending that feels like using the meta narrative twist as an excuse to avoid having any sort of actual finale. especially considering the cut content in the game files hinting towards a more proper finale or ending that was cut while the first game at least had a proper ending cinematic.
• Difficulty Spike: Turrets, the only type of killdrone to drop ammo when defeated, are not as common as drones are near the spawn point of the Sleepwalker and Awake ranks, thus making ammo even more precious.
• Disappointing Last Level: Awake, the last of the game's five ranks, has no turrets near the spawn point, so cameras are not as dangerous there due to them not being accompanied by Killdrones that can shoot you quickly. The cameras are also tedious to hack, and only three tapes need to be collected.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The Desert Eagle is touted in-game as very impractical, and people who do use it are made fun of for being insecure and wanting to project power and wealth. However, in actual gameplay, the gun's bullets are strong enough to kill or incapacitate killdrones in a single shot most of the time, regardless of where you shoot them.
• Game-Breaker: The Desert Eagle, of all things. This gun is infamous for being Awesome, but Impractical in real life because of its weight, recoil, and cost. However, in the game, the .50 Action Express rounds that it fires are absolutely devastating against Killdrones. Shoot a turret in the ammo box? Odds are the force of the impact will tip it over (not unlike the Remington 870 mod in Receiver). Shoot a flying taser killdrone... anywhere? Most of the time it will either plop to the ground like a rock, spiral out of control headlong into a wall or prop, or simply break into smithereens. The only real downsides of the gun compared to the other weapons stem from its stopping power: follow-up shots are inaccurate, and failing to safely holster the Desert Eagle is an instant death, while other weapons just hobble you momentarily and guarantee surviving one more negligent discharge (but that is easy to work around if you practice holster discipline or turn the safety on — things the game actively encourages anyway). A vulgar display of power indeed.
• Genius Bonus: "Röntgen", the achievement for getting shot through an opaque surface, is named after a legacy unit of X- and gamma-ray exposure (radiation that can pass through objects that visible light cannot).
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Drones might be less dangerous than they are in the first game, but if one finds and chases you, it will still be very difficult to shoot, and you might be forced to backtrack, possibly into turret fire. Unlike turrets, they don't drop ammo.
  • Armored turrets are completely impervious to most handgun calibers from the front, and even the mighty Desert Eagle is not perfectly guaranteed to punch through and hit vitals, so the player might have to resort to either completely avoiding the things, or to flank them, which may not always be feasible.
  • While security cameras in the later levels aren't a threat on their own, letting one sound its alarm alerts nearby drones, and even turrets, to your location. They take much longer to hack than most other Killdrones, and like drones, they don't drop ammo when shot.
  • There are certain spawn positions of floor turrets where they rotate narrowly enough (or typically not at all!) to likely be impossible to flank, and thus impossible to safely confront while their chambers are loaded.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The beautiful singing voice that is heard when you are close to a tape.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Remember how in the first game the tapes discussed how the Threat was corrupting media to have damaging ideas? This game shows that with Threat Echoes. Some of the tapes you can find have the last words of people who were almost Driven to Suicide. If you listen to one of these tapes, after a few seconds the Threat will force you to load whatever firearm you're holding and turn it on yourself. There's very little you can do in this situation except make your best effort to get rid of all your ammunition and un-load your gun completely so that it dry-fires instead.
  • Sleeping turrets, dear heavens. These turrets remain silent and have their lights off to avoid being given away to you easily, and only fully activate when you get in range of their infrared motion sensors. Starting from the rank Asleep, you can't blindly trust a dark and silent room anymore.
  • The Stalker Entity is an elusive and frightening enemy. The circumstances leading to its activation are obscure enough, and when triggered, it doesn't appear immediately. You'll first only notice the music going slightly more intense, and then periodic grinding sounds while it teleports around you. When it's finally ready to attack, it slows you down, then lunges to stab you, giving very little time to react and fight back.
• Realism-Induced Horror: There are things that Receiver 2 is more willing to tell players than most other games involving guns:
  • To any gun owners that live around or with kids, these are sure to hit especially close to home:
    "Most lethal gun accidents involve children."
    "Your children know where you keep your guns. Hiding them is not enough."
  • Furthermore, the game emphasizes how easily guns can make stupidity and mental illness much more dangerous, which makes sense considering that a majority of the US's gun-related deaths are self-inflicted.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game doesn't render killdrones in spaces it thinks you can't get to from the adjacent cell. This is a problem when jumping over a wall on a roof, as a turret or drone could pop into existence as you go between rooms, giving you no time to react.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The addition of accidental discharges really hit the Glock 17 hard. Its lack of a safety makes it extremely prone to accidental discharges that waste ammo and slow you down (revolvers don't have safeties either, but you can holster them with the hammer decocked). And this is in addition to the Awesome, but Impractical nature of the Full Auto mode.
  • While all semi automatic handguns can have stoppages, the Hi-Point C-9 chronically suffers from out-of-battery malfunctions. This combines with its short sight radius to make it very unwieldy to use compared to more reliable guns like the M1911.
  • The Colt Detective Special is essentially a worse Model 10 thanks to its snub-nosed barrel reducing its sight radius, making ranged precision shooting extremely difficult. The only real advantages it has in return are its faster double action trigger (as of the trigger weight system update in version 2.2.0) lending it better performance when trying to panic-fire at incoming shock drones, and that spent rounds will never get stuck so long as the extractor is fully extended and you aren't facing directly down, resulting in slightly faster and more consistent reloads.
• Tainted by the Preview: The game's progression system had gotten some criticism with how it worked at launch. The way that it still currently works is that you increase your rank and can advance in the story and unlock new firearms by collecting tapes. Completing a level by collecting all of the tapes in it will rank you up to the next level. Inversely, dying for any reason will demote you to a lower rank and set you back in the story. However, when the game first launched, the latter would also happen if you simply quit the game, discouraging you from taking breaks if you need them or just wanted to stop playing. Thankfully, updates have changed the demoting to only occur upon deaths.
• That One Level: Liminal, the 4th rank out of 5, is almost universally considered the most difficult rank in the entire game. The rank is the stingiest with tape spawning and particularly aggressive with door barricades, forcing you to traverse more dangerous rooms. The ammo pickups being more common in this rank than any other besides Baseline is something you will need — this rank also introduces Armored Turrets that are immune to almost all handgun calibers from the front. The only handgun caliber reliably capable of punching through it is the .50 Action Express, belonging to only one gun: the Desert Eagle. On top of that, the Ceiling Turrets introduced in Sleepwalker can also be armored here (and a bug renders Ceiling Turret armor completely inpenetrable to even the Deagle's bullets!). Also, Killdrone placement becomes horrifyingly erratic, as some areas have so many Turrets placed in nearly impossible to flank locations (doubly so for Ceiling Turrets, especially in low light conditions), with Armored Turrets frequently watching doors, Ceiling Turrets consistently covering blind spots, and Shock Drones even more commonly patrolling just about every corner of an area. And to top it all off, this rank introduces Security Cameras, which alert every Killdrone in the area to your current position. Beating this rank often requires efficient observation, improbable aiming skills, and truckloads of patience.