Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

When Hotline Miami came out near the end of 2012, it took the gaming community by storm. What came together as a whole was a completely unique experience. It's fast paced game play, unbelievably cool soundtrack and grimy 80s inspired art direction was something solely original and created an incredibly satisfying game. I remember playing it now for the first time being completely floored by it. A common thing you heard about Hotline Miami was “it was a game made for me”. The reverence it held for crime films and the inspirations it took all seemed to converge with my same sensibilities, it was a gleefully violent good time. Three years later they made a sequel that in almost every way matches the original and in many ways succeeds the original.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number focuses on several different characters taking place both before and after the first game, including interesting and varied locations. I wont try to explain the story, I feel like I understood what happened but the particulars of how things connect I'm not sure of to be honest. While the story jumps from place to place and time to time in ways that can make it convoluted and difficult to understand I felt like it wasn't really important to completely comprehend the story. While the story can be difficult the specific story moments that it shows you and lets you interact with are really something special. The ways in which they play with the framework of “Hotline Miami” are really interesting and the music ties in with the cut scenes in some fantastic ways that almost always put a big grin on my face. It was apparent that the individuals making this game were having as much fun as possible putting in as many interesting story beats as they could.

The more fleshed out story and locations of Hotline Miami 2 aren't the only thing that has changed with the sequel. The game play is at first strikingly similar. The basic movement and feel has gone unchanged yet there is an additional level of complexity and the difficulty has been ratcheted up a notch including a heavier emphasis on gunplay. The average stage in Hotline Miami 2 is considerably larger than in the first game with an added number of enemies as well. This did make the stages more daunting, there's nothing quite like walking into a room and immediately being overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task of taking everyone down. Getting past that initial wave of anxiety and once I got enemy patterns down it became a game of executing on my strategy and occasionally changing up that strategy when it wasn't working. This game is different from the original in that there are no longer the myriad of masks but four unique characters to play as that have differing move sets. While getting to unlock all the different modifiers in the many masks of the first game was fun and satisfying, I can understand them wanting to do something different for the sequel even if that does leave me longing for being able to try out different styles depending on what mask I'm using. The larger areas of Hotline Miami 2 do lend to some momentarily frustrating moments of getting picked off screen by an enemy sight unseen. When that would happen, and it only really happened when I was playing sloppy, I would reset myself make note and try to being more cunning the next time. The added size and enemy number is integral to the experience making it much more satisfying when you finally complete a stage. While Hotline Miami certainly is not an easy game, I never found myself getting frustrated at its difficulty. Every time I'd die I felt like I learned something new, a new strategy, a new attack pattern. Ultimately it ended up being a very satisfying and rewarding challenge. Once I got to the third act I blazed through the game in only a couple sittings.

The feeling of playing Hotline Miami 2 brings me back to the first time I saw Pulp Fiction or Goodfellas. The feeling of witnessing such an unabashedly cool and boldly creative videogame isn't something we see very much of. The sense of a single guiding vision is unique in games and Hotline Miami 2 is brimming with it. The music, game play and interesting story moments made this game one of the all around best experiences I've had in games this year. It's the sort of game that makes others pale in comparison. While you might not get to relive the newness of the first game, Hotline Miami 2 is equally special and deserves to be played and completed by as many people as possible.