The original Hotline Miami was released during the beginning of the indie surge of 2012. A game started by a team of two programmers, it quickly gathered attention and a dedicated following due to its fast-paced, old school arcade game play and highly stylized and intense violence. Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin quickly became indie darlings as Hotline Miami became one of the many examples of what the indie scene was capable of. Once the high of the game’s initial success and acclaim passed the pressure was on them to deliver a sequel that would live up to the hype created by their first game while still making something that was bigger and better and that remains true to what made the first game great.That is a hard balance to keep. Triple A franchises lose sight of what made their games great all the time. So how did they do? Well, in general they did well. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is a worthy successor to the original game, even though there were some missteps in the design.
To talk about Hotline Miami 2, I feel it is necessary to speak a little bit on what made the original game so popular. Hotline Miami was a game in which the main character murdered entire buildings filled with Russian gangsters under the instructions of cryptic phone calls he received. The gameplay consisted of racing through the level in a top down view, picking up weapons and trying to plan and improvise, and dying a lot. Save a few exceptions, enemies die with one hit, as does the player. You died, and died a lot, but with a press of the button you can restart the level so the rhythm, fueled by a fantastic techno soundtrack, did not slow down until you finished the level. Then, rather than fade to black and go to the next level, the music stopped, replaced by a single low note, and you are tasked with walking back to your car, passing the mangled bodies of your victims as you walked away.
Hotline Miami was praised for its story, but I feel that the acclaim wasn’t entirely accurate. It’s not so much Hotline Miami had a good story as much as that it had a story so vague and sparse that it allowed players to fill a lot of the blanks. This was enhanced by the fact that the protagonist of the game was clearly bat-shit crazy, and so it is hard to determine what happened and what didn’t. It became an exercise in following an unreliable protagonist and trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t in the vein of works like Inherent Vice. Especially because there are two time lines in the game, requiring some mental gymnastics to fit together into a coherent whole. This made the game fun to discuss with friends and theory-craft to try to make our perception of the story fit. It wasn’t so much what the plot presented but what it didn’t that made the game’s narrative a topic of conversation.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number has a much greater focus on narrative, aiming to explain the context in which the first game occurred. Shedding a light on the dark spots that invited the player’s interpretation in the first game was the wrong approach. The story is not particularly bad, but it is also nothing special. It is somewhat cliched and not as interesting as what players themselves can come up with with their imaginations. It did do some things that I liked, such as cover several different characters that play differently. This includes a duel of two characters at once, one using a firearm and another wielding a chain saw, soldiers with access to military gear, and a character that tries to get through the levels through non-lethal means.
The plot was not really the main draw of Hotline Miami in the first place. It was the was the gameplay. That remains largely unchanged. The game is in many ways the same game as the original. You walk into a level, and you must figure out how to kill everyone in the area before you can move on, most enemies take a hit to die as do you. The controls are exactly the same as they were in the first game, which means they are good for melee, but they aren’t really suited for gunplay. The game still forces you to lock on to enemies to have a good chance to hit them, which given the fast pace of the game makes it very difficult to deal with it effectively. Of course, using a firearm makes most of the enemies in the close range charge at you, which can be used tactically, but can also be a hindrance when playing. Hotline Miami 2 seems to have a lot more enemies that its predecessor, and guns are a lot more common, which in turns means that there is a greater emphasis on using guns to clear the levels. In fact the variety of weapons seems to have been reduced to fit the different characters better. It is not a big issue, but it feels like a downgrade not to have the variety you saw in the first game.
A more important change is that the levels are too long. While I do appreciate that they tried to give more content, the levels can be as much as six very difficult sections long, and the game does not allow you to save the progress between them, which means if you have to stop playing for any reason you have to start the level all the way from the beginning. It loses the ability to pick up the game and play it for 15 minutes the original had. This feels like something that could have been fairly easily addressed by having a quick save or check point system between the sections in the level. It already produces a checkpoint when you die.
Despite this annoyances, when the music gets going, and you get in the rhythm of the game, Hotline Miami 2 is as satisfying as ever. The focus on several characters allows Dennaton to throw some interesting curve balls in the game and the way it is played in certain instances. Masks are no longer a central focus of the game although they are present for certain characters, but since the different playable characters largely save the same function of adding game play variety that the masks served the first game I didn’t miss them much. I missed them a bit in an aesthetic concept. It is hard to beat the surrealism of a man in a rooster mask beating people to death, but there is little effect gameplay wise.
It is a better game than its predecessor in some ways too. There is more variety in the environment than there was in the original game. Part 2 is also much longer. While I do feel that the levels are too long without an option to save the game and drop back in, I do appreciate the effort in making them more complex and tactical. There are a lot more of them too. Hotline Miami 2 could easily keep you entertained for as long as some of the triple A fare available today. It is also harder, though some of that difficulty can be frustrating as you are killed by a gun wielding enemy off screen. A lot of the difficulty hinges on the enemies being more aware of your presence. This makes the game feel more tactical (though not less twitchy), and it feels great when one of your dastardly schemes works. Speaking of difficulty, if you are a completionist, some of the achievements look amazingly hard, so they are bound to keep you busy for a while.
So did the two man Dennaton studios deliver a worthy successor to the original Hotline Miami? Yes, they did. It is clearly a Hotline Miami game, but there is enough variety that it doesn’t feel like just an expansion of the first. There are some improvements from the original that make it worth playing, and some flaws but it is ultimately a similar experience. The focus on story this time around does not help the game. It would have been better served by keeping it the vague recollections of a psychopath. Still this doesn’t detract from the game. It is perhaps cheap and lazy to say that if you liked Hotline Miami you will enjoy the sequel but really that is the case. This will not change your mind if you didn’t enjoy the first game. And if you haven’t played Hotline Miami? Pick them both up! Steam has a $20 combo pack, and if nothing else they are worth playing since there isn’t quite anything like these games out there.
