You are Improv, a MacGyveresque hero with a talent for making tools out of common objects, and your team consists of Newsboy, who can instantly provide a news update on any topic, Lexicon, who always knows the right word, Clapper, who can find any missing object, and Pastiche, who has assorted random powers (among them the power to sing lines from Top 40 songs relevant to almost any occasion). You can ask your sidekicks for help at any time; you won't always get a hint from each of them, but you'll usually get help in some form somewhere. Truth to tell, not getting anywhere is at least as rewarding as making progress, since your fellow superheroes have a wide range of amusing sarcastic responses. Moreover, the ending encounter with the Mr. Redundancy Man of the title is absolutely hilarious, mainly for the villain's dialogue: "Welcome to my hideaway lair, my dear friends of mine! Your arrival has come fortuitously just in time for you to witness the sight of my greatest and most triumphal achievement!" The way you deal with him is clever, but it's the premise itself that makes this worth playing--he has such a wealth of amusingly repetitive dialogue that it's more entertaining to find all the ways to interact with him than to set to work at solving the puzzle.
Both the first and second Frenetic Five games draw much of their humor from humdrum settings and tasks--i.e., you have superheroes riding the bus and trying to operate a copy machine--and while it's amusing here, as in the first one, the frustration aspect of wrestling with boring objectives comes perilously close to being simply irritating. Contributing to that problem is an unfortunate fellow named the Validator, who comments on everything you do, as follows:
>examine validator Some superheroes are blessed with a magnificent physique, like Backhoe Woman and The Human Hydraulic Press. Some have powers that are only dreamt of by regular humans, such as The Defenestrator and Microwave-Popcorn Boy. Some have neither, but are at least fun to be around and get invited to lots of parties. Then there's the Validator. The Validator says, "Outstanding! It never would have occurred to me to inspect the Validator!" >kick validator It's not clear how to kick the Validator. The Validator says, "Oh, kick the Validator, huh? Great idea!"You get the idea. It's not a bad joke, but it's not especially funny for more than a few turns, and the typical player will end up spending more than a few turns around this particular irritant. At any rate, the Validator brings out the basic mundanity of the setting--there's nothing that makes a setting seem quite so mundane as an irritating person commenting on everything you do--as well as the ho-hum nature of your powers, and those of your sidekicks. It's not every writer who could make mundanity funny, but this one does. E.g.: "The clerk looks thoughtful, in a manner that makes it clear that thought is not a usual requirement of the job."
The puzzles, by and large, are nothing special, with the exception of the endgame puzzle, whose solution is a real "aha" moment. There's one earlier puzzle that takes either a major logical leap or better visualization skills than I have, but it's a relatively minor flaw, particularly in a game this small. The second episode of this series corrects the main flaw of the first one, namely that there was no particular rhyme or reason to when your fellow superheroes would be able to help you, and no standard way to ask them to intervene; here, "ask x for help" elicits either action (solving a problem you couldn't solve on your own) or some sort of response. It's not a perfect solution-- it's still rarely obvious when you should be addressing a problem with your own wits, in the manner of standard IF, and when you should be relying on your team--but at least Episode Two doesn't require you to guess what the other members of the team would do, which was the major flaw of the first Frenetic Five. Having a standardized way to kick a puzzle out to the rest of the gang makes things much easier.
There's not a lot to the second edition of Frenetic Five; it's solvable in half an hour or so, and it doesn't do anything all that surprising. But it has several laugh-out-loud moments, and fans of superheroes will no doubt grin knowingly at the absurdity of it all.