(Before I start, I admit that I have not finished Hotline Miami 2. I played enough of the game to know that I could not continue.)

I like Hotline Miami a lot.

Now, I'm not crazy obsessed with it...I think. I haven't done a Hotline Miami cosplay (yet?) and I'm not here to share my 20 thinkpieces I've written about it. But it was by far my favorite game of 2012 because at the time, I'd never played anything like it.

Each level of Hotline Miami is a thrilling action puzzle, supplemented by the fact that you could choose a different power with the variety of masks. If you want to play run-and-gun, sure. If you want to be patient and take out mobsters one by one by baiting and luring, it allowed that too.

Not only that, but what really drew me into Hotline Miami were the story and themes. It's still one of the VERY few video games I can recall with a unpretentious critique of violent media as part of the plot. They don't draw a line about if your character or yourself are a bad person. Violence is prevalent in video games, movies, and television and it's impossible to escape. It's entertaining. Is it bad to be entertained by violence? Is your character a psychopath or the hero? What the hell happened in those Biker levels anyway and who actually died?

Reading through fan theories and analyzing the story and themes of Hotline Miami were just as much fun for me as playing it. The game is the total package and remains one of my favorites of all time.

Which is why I'm so disappointed in Hotline Miami 2, which is not even half as good as the first game.

Hotline Miami came out around the same time of Super Meat Boy and other “ultra-hard” games and was kind of lumped into that trend. It was very difficult, but fair and catered to multiple playstyles due to the unique abilities of each mask. For the early parts of Hotline Miami 2, I was getting exactly what I wanted: more maps, more masks with new abilities, an incredible soundtrack, and the same pulse-pounding gameplay that hooked me in the first place.

But then I started losing. A lot. Like, more times than I died in Hotline Miami in the comparable early stages. I understand spiking up the difficulty for the sequel, but these deaths felt cheap and unavoidable.

The maps are incredibly huge compared to Hotline Miami 2. This leads to my problem of getting shot across the map from a guy I can't see.

There's windows all over the maps and enemies so far away that you can't even move the screen far enough to see them. So on the stage I just linked, I kept getting shot over and over from people I couldn't shoot back...either I couldn't see them, or random bits of furniture got in the way and it's VERY UNCLEAR what furniture you can shoot over or through!

My character has “Lethal Throws” that make any thrown item kill instead of knock down. But I am basically being forced to use guns because there are too many enemies to actually use my special ability on.

I'm not allowed the strategy I was in Hotline Miami 1. I'm not personally a fan of using guns, but you GOTTA use guns in Hotline Miami 2. YOU MUST. You use guns, or you die and if you don't like guns deal with it. So the “combat puzzles” that allow different players to solve different stages in different ways aren't really a thing in most of the stages I played: there is always an optimal strategy. And that strategy says “if you want to melee, you are wrong”.

The story in Hotline Miami 2 has no mystery, no interesting themes or shades of gray. If Hotline Miami was a subtle critique of violence, Hotline Miami 2 is a cynical celebration of it. Scenes of sexual violence are tasteless, cynically added as shock value and to get publicity for the game. Even the beginning of the game just has a bunch of bored slackers deciding to go kill for fun/sport. Jacket wasn't a good guy, but I still got some enjoyment out of piecing together why he was killing. Was he brainwashed, confused, or just really bloodthirsty?

In Hotline Miami 2 I know why these people are killing. Because violence is fun and cool! Did the same writers even work on both games?

I don't like Hotline Miami 2 nearly as much as the first. I can admit my extreme bias here as the first is one of my favorite games EVER and I replay it from time to time.

But in Hotline Miami 2, I didn't care about the story or the characters. The stages were overly frustrating instead of tough-but-fair. If it all turns around later in the game and the level design gets better and the story improves, that's great! But I played several hours of the game and was so frustrated by the experience that I've shut it off and haven't touched it in months.

I'm glad Hotline Miami exists, and I'm even happier that there won't be a third.

Great post. I literally played 20 minutes of HL2 and found out that the game wasn't for me. Soundtrack is absolutely amazing, but the larger areas and focus on guns are what I hated most about the first game and this just took that further. It might be my biggest disappointment of the year.

Hotline Miami is frustrating at first because it demands a lot more from the player, but once you get over that hump it really is just as good as the first game.

Also, your critique of the story makes no sense if you haven't beaten the game. Even once you beat the game you still have to puzzle the story together.

You are judging the story off of the one group of characters, it's much more expansive and deep then that particular group who are supposed to represent deep seeded hate, especially against the Russians who in that games world are rather hated.

I also completely disagree the sexual assault scene was added just for attention, besides the one reviewer or journalist or whoever she was that had a problem with it, they never went around going 'look what we have! look what we have! be shocked!" the game uses violence, that's the art of the game, how fun it is, how disgusting it is, sexual violence is still violence and I think has it's place in this game.

Yeah, I can see that being the case. Unfortunately I don't like playing the game so I'll probably just watch a walkthrough.

I'm currently writing a walk-through for Hotline Miami 2. So far I have "Hide behind a door and wait in a corner. Shoot one shot to attract all enemies. Shoot every person that runs through the door. End."

It feels cheap to resort to this tactic on nearly every level, but when I die 20+ times trying to complete the game the "right" way, I feel I have no choice, but to be cheap.

I agree with you on almost all counts. Hotline Miami has well-crafted, diverse and varied challenges and grants the player a lot of tactical freedom. In addition, I could not agree more about the 'unpretentious critique' and its lack of drawing of lines. It prods and provokes rather than pontificate. Hotline Miami 2 lost me in both gameplay and story.

I think the expanding nature of the narrative killed the real personal and provocative feeling of Hotline Miami the first. Switching between multiple characters early on, the constant sense of 'pulling back' reality might actually make the player pull back from the experience. There's a very personal tone ("I'm here to tell you how to kill people." "Knowing oneself means acknowleging one's actions." "Do you like hurting people?") in the original, that seems lost in the alienating facade they put up in the second. In the original, you consider how your/Jacket's perspective is slipping, but in the sequel, the events everywhere don't seem hallucinatory or psychotic, but staged and fake. Even the nature of the gameplay reflects this, the original is about momentum, rhythm, reactions, there's an alluring pulse under the action that asks you to get lost in carnage and infinite, rapid death. The record-needle vrrt and yawny feedback after all the enemies are dead seems designed to instill dissonance and self-reflection, preferably after 30 restarts with raised ire. Hotline Miami seems designed to provoke the Bob Backlund what have I done feeling. In comparison, you cannot play Wrong Number with any kind of pulse or 'attack attack attack' mindset. You have to approach it clinically and timidly. Rather than rattle your nerves with action, it stretches them out with tension.

Hotline Miami 1 is a good bad drug, and Hotline Miami 2 is the headache the morning after.

I half wonder if Wrong Number was designed as this weird crossroad of epic theater and sturm und drang. Or perhaps I just wish to cast it as intentionally alienating to save some face for the series.

The protagonist in a typical Sturm und Drang stage work, poem, or novel is driven to action—often violent action—not by pursuit of noble means nor by true motives, but by revenge and greed. Goethe's unfinished Prometheus exemplifies this along with the common ambiguity provided by juxtaposing humanistic platitudes with outbursts of irrationality. The literature of Sturm und Drang features an anti-aristocratic slant while seeking to elevate all things humble, natural, or intensely real (especially whatever is painful, tormenting, or frightening).

Epic theatre was primarily proposed by Bertolt Brecht who suggested that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable. One of the most important techniques Brecht developed to perform epic theater is the Verfremdungseffekt, or the "alienation" effect. The purpose of this technique was to make the audience feel detached from the action of the play, so they do not become immersed in the fictional reality of the stage or become overly empathetic of the character. Flooding the theater with bright lights (not just the stage), having actors play multiple characters, having actors also rearrange the set in full view of the audience and "breaking the fourth wall" by speaking to the audience are all ways he used to achieve the Verfremdungseffekt.

Over the course of Hotline Miami 1, you get the time to put yourself into that blank character, almost getting to a point where you feel some sort of agency, when narratively you of course have none. And the big theme of the game is indeed one about you, the player. With the sequel though, you're filling in the shoes of more defined characters. You get to know them through their dialogue and particularities in gameplay. It still feels personal, it's just not you that's being explored, it's these other characters. And through them all, including Jacket, you come to know a world that's already well and gone. It's already slipped, and you're just experiencing the final moments of the fall.

Gameplay-wise, it's definitely more of a challenge coming from Hotline Miami 1. Whether it's more challenging than Hotline Miami 1 was coming nothing though, I'm not so sure. The luring tactics and plotting an ideal path through levels isn't something I only did in Hotline Miami 2. Both games were very similar gameplay experiences. You go to an area, create a mental map of the section (by dying a bunch), formulate a plan of attack, and then execute that plan (after dying a bunch more). It's all still very fast, and all still very exciting.

I understand why you wouldn't want to finish the game if you found it too frustrating, but I think that because of that you can't really critique the story and it's themes, especially relating to the nature of violence, too much, especially as the turns that come in the final act and at the end of specific characters arcs cast everything in a different light.

It would be like playing MGS2 up to right before you enter Arsenal Gear and finishing there and complaining that it copied MGS1 too much. There are elements in the final acts for both games that completely recontextualise (is that a word? It is now) everything that came before.

I find this specific reaction in people really strange. Jeff really liked Hotline Miami and has gone on record saying that he doesn't like HM2 at all. It's really perplexing as I like both and they're basically the same game to me. HM2 feels like a huge expansion pack - the beginning of HM2 is basically like if HM didn't end and just kept going, the levels becoming bigger and harder. It's a natural progression in difficulty and I think that's how they wanted it to be.

The people who love the first one probably do so because there was a steady ramp up to the really difficult levels near the end. Those early stages that teach you the game are initially challenging but not enough to really test your merit. So you cruise on by until you're at the last quarter and when that difficulty wall comes up you've had a nice long run up to overcome it. There's no slow ramp up in HM2 as the wall is right there in your face from the moment you start.

All the other elements are there. The music is just as good, the visuals are equally awesome if not better and the multiple character story is really interesting with a great finale.

@humanity: Totally agree on the music and visuals being excellent, undoubtedly better than the first. And I wish I could stick it out and see it all for myself but I just hate playing the game. It makes sense that the game is harder than the first, but they also switched up level design and enemies (both types & behavior) in ways that I didn't enjoy.

@perfidioussinn: At the end of the day I guess this was just the game they wanted to make. They could have tried to reinvent the wheel, but I guess what they really wanted was to make the same game again but a lot more difficult. I think strategy and puzzle solving is still there, but the level of precision required to execute on it has been raised exponentially. On my first playthrough I really struggled with all the levels and couldn't keep a high combo to save my life. After beating the game and seeing the awesome ending I was motivated to try harder. So I started playing the levels from the beginning and found that there was a flow to it all and that I have gotten faster and sharper at it all. In this one level especially that is a big circle with rooms I managed to kill everyone in one long combo. I won't lie, it took a good two dozen tries for me to get it, but I was really motivated and most importantly I saw exactly how I needed to do it - the only problem was executing on it.

So I understand your concerns perfectly. If you don't enjoy it you just don't enjoy it and thats it, but it really is exactly the same game it's just the difficulty knob is turned all the way up and that can be daunting.

@brodehouse said:

Yeah, I just felt no connection to the story at all, because it was too scattershot, and some of the plotlines have almost no relevance to anything. Like, Jake: yep, this fat redneck racist sure is an asshole - oh look, he died, the end, moving on (maybe you pass on a data disk to The Writer, which also amounts to nothing other than a pointless bonus level). Shifting between multiple characters hurt the story a lot, because none of the individual character arcs were interesting enough. Doing that character switch worked as a surprise twist epilogue in the first game, but I don't think it's nearly as effective in the sequel. Also sucks that it really limits the playstyles, instead of having like 20+ masks available to you.

The level design doesn't feel like a continuation of where the difficulty left off in the first game, as some people say, because I think the second game's level design is just silly. Big open levels aren't that bad (the first game had a few), but the fact that 90% of walls are actually just banks of windows is fucking silly, both for gameplay and for me thinking that these feel in any way like real buildings. That is not how rooms are designed.

I commend Hotline Miami 2 for its music and art (especially that last level as The Son), and it has minor good moments in the story like when the Fans try to save that guy's sister, but the majority of the gameplay and story are so poorly conceived that I'd say the overall game is weak and skippable.

@humanity: How did you play the game? I've been considering switching from mouse&keyboard to PS4 pad and seeing if that makes it any easier.

@perfidioussinn: I played with keyboard at first as well but the gamepad seemed so much better since you really do need to lock-on a lot more in this one. It seems strange that a pad would be more accurate than just swinging the mouse but somehow, for me anyway, it made everything a lot easier.

I loved hotline miami 2. Also if you haven't beaten the story it's kinda hard to critique it. The way it weaves in and out of before and after the first game is really cool and there's still plenty of mystery, with minor characters from the first game popping up as playable characters. Overall it's a bummer you didn't like it but it's a rad game that's just as good as the first.

I think HM2 is the better game. I personally like using guns, but you can definitely go the all melee route if you want. It's harder, but it's more rewarding when you pull it off. The game looks better, has a better soundtrack, and although the story isn't perfect, at least they put some effort in this time. I felt like the story in the first game was just thrown into the game haphazardly. I was really disappointed after seeing the way both character arcs ended in that game.

I'm also surprised that people are saying this new game is celebrating violence whilst the first game was a critique. Especially if you are also saying that you had more agency in the first game, as if the idea of you killing tons of people is okay, but the moment someone else does it, it's a problem? I'm not sure I follow the logic there.

Agree with you and Nightriff. I played Hotline the December it came out on Steam because I was pressured into buying it and I ended up loving it. It started off hard but a couple levels in and I was breezing through the game, which is weird because I hate playing with KBM. Games where you die a lot also piss me off but for this game, I always knew it was my fault I died and it was fun. I didn't beat the last level though. Played about 45 minutes of that boss before I gave up. When it came out on Vita, I played it and swept through the game. Even beat the boss in 2 tries. Went for the platinum trophy but some of the trophies were messed up so I didn't get it. Point is, I loved HM. I was hyped for Hotline 2. It was in my top 5 for games I was most hyped for in 2015. Then it came out and I played it and 20 minutes in I realized one thing.... I wasn't having fun. The game relies HEAVILY on guns which was the worst thing about Hotline Miami. The areas are huge so you end up dying from across the map without even knowing. The twins are a neat idea but are clunky as fuck to use. The dude who one punches everyone can't pick up guns so he's frustrating to use (I actually gave up on the game when I got to a level with him that I straight up couldn't beat for an hour). The dual wield guy is annoying to use. The zebra dudes roll is hard to get used to with roll being the same button as execute. The detective and journalist (?) missions suck. Didn't care for the army missions. That game is such a mess. I played about 4 hours before I decided I didn't want to continue. It's my disappointment of the year. There is literally nothing coming this year that can top it as most disappointing to me. I also can't believe how many people liked it. People tell me it's just harder when it's actually just really cheap and boring. It's pretty fucking insane that the worst thing about the first Hotline (the guns), they made the main focus in Hotline 2.

yes, it was a big disappointment. everything about the game was sub par

I think everyone who thinks HM2 is worse is nuts. Wish I could elaborate more atm but on mobile which isn't great for penning long form thought posts.

But needless to say the tl;dr is I think a lot of people expected HM2 to be a specific type of thing rather than accepting it for what it is.

I agree on all points. It mishandled what was great about the first game and just went completely wonky in story and gameplay. Easily my most disappointing game in a while.

I see the challenge in HM2 as a natural progression of the gameplay mechanics from the original. They had to up the ante in some way, and while I don't always thinks it works, it didn't deter me from finishing the game. There were definitely times I wanted to whip my Vita against the wall, but it's all trial and error and it feels way more satisfying to clear a room in this one than it does in the first Hotline. I got pretty angry playing the first game too, and I think that frustration is intentional, it's supposed to immerse you in the insane acts that you are committing. Regarding guns, I used fist-only characters whenever I could and I thought it easier than trying to target shots. The best use of guns I found is drawing attention so you can get everyone in a tiny room and spray them, or quickly grab the knife and cut them up.

Storywise, it's definitely not as focused or mysterious as the original, but I found it more engaging. The first game does a better job of involving the player, but I think if you view this story for what it is instead of trying to piece together the overarching plot, you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of it. It has actual characters, and their stories are smaller and only loosely connected, but it's all still tied to Jacket. I think the game is still making a commentary on violence, but it's more about how the pursuit of it can affect people differently, instead of examining how it affects the player. I didn't think it was cheap and cynical at all, it kept me interested until the end and I thought some of the characters were quite compelling, even integrating small moral choices that change their story a little.

Hotline Miami 2 is a much more complex and less approachable game than the original, but it rewards your persistence. I would say it's worth finishing.

Loved the game. After finishing it, I started reading up on the stories and the theories and there's a TON of depth and little things to read through.

As for the gameplay? Yeah, the environments are bigger and it took some time to get used to. But once I did, I realized how tactical I had to be. HM1 was faster and more compact, but I still have that game to play through whenever I want.

2 turned out to be a risky game in many respects. A bunch of characters, bigger focus on guns, larger environments with more demanding gameplay, and a grander scope with a much longer campaign. I can see why people wouldn't like it (hell, I almost quit a couple hours in), but once I shifted my thinking to what it is rather than what it isn't, it assured itself a spot on my top-10 list for 2015.