This breaks your combo, and doesn’t feel very Hotline Miami – the original game seemed designed to encourage reckless endeavour, it told you that it’s okay to die. In these large spaces you spend more time holding the shift key to look ahead, taking pot shots around corners at off-screen enemies, than rushing in and taking risks. Level design is also an issue, with maps that are way too big.
It’s an impressively varied game, with frequent shifts in tone and multiple playable characters, but this has watered down the elegant precision that was central to the original. All too often you feel like you’re playing it the way the developers want you to, rather than coming up with your own strategy. But it also diminishes the freeform structure that made the first game such a compelling score attack sandbox. This takes you out of your comfort zone, encouraging you to adopt new tactics and play in different ways. Another starts with a gun, but is stuck with it for the entire level. One can kill an enemy with a single punch, but can’t pick up dropped weapons. As the game jumps between time periods, filling out the original’s backstory, you’re forced to play as characters with very specific strengths and weaknesses. Hotline Miami 2 is, compared to its predecessor, a much more linear experience, regularly pressuring you into a specific play style. More often than not, it’s the latter.ĭisappointingly, however, there aren’t as many of these opportunities for improvisation as there are in the first game. You might have carefully planned it this way, or it could have just been dumb luck. This all happens in a wild, bloody flash of brutality. Then you grab the gun, pirouette around a corner, and take out another two guys with one shot. You grab the knife he dropped and throw it at his friend who’s just rushed into the room with a shotgun, killing him instantly. You burst through a door, knocking a goon on his back, then finish him off with a volley of punches. But then you nail it, and it feels amazing.
Hitting the R key to restart is a fundamental part of the game’s savage, staccato rhythm. You’ll die constantly as you learn the layout of the level and the positions of its enemies. You clear a level by killing everyone in it, but the journey there is hard-earned. It is, as before, a puzzle game disguised as a breathlessly fast top-down shooter. Hotline Miami 2 is a sequel that, largely (and ironically considering its subject matter), plays it safe. Released in 2012 by two-man team Dennaton Games, Hotline Miami turned the thin narrative of a hallucinating hitman carrying out assassination missions for a weird coterie of gang bosses, into an aggressively trippy indie classic. Of course, the same could be said for the first game. Playing with a good set of headphones, beating Russian gangsters with baseball bats to the throbbing beat, you can’t help but be hypnotised by its decadent, exhilarating cocktail of masochistic, rapid-fire action. Drenched in gaudy neon and soundtracked by a playlist of aggressive, pounding techno, it’s an intoxicating assault on the senses. There’s no attempt to rationalise or apologise for its extreme violence. H otline Miami 2 is a game about killing people as stylishly, efficiently, and brutally as possible.