Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number Review
Hotline Miami was an incredible game. A hypnotic blur of colourful visuals, amazing music and perfectly executed trial-and-error action-meets-puzzle gameplay that stayed fun for hours on end. Unfortunately for its sequel, however, Hotline Miami 2 has the daunting task of following up a universally loved and critically-acclaimed game that was pretty damn close to flawless. Hotline Miami 2 takes to this challenge with extreme confidence, though, and opts to go for a far more ambitious title that, despite suffering from perhaps one too many ideas at some points, still manages to be just as incredibly exciting and unique as the original.
Where the game's ambition really shines is mostly through its unique narrative elements. As with the first game, Hotline Miami 2 is a fucking weird game. The game's story, however, somehow manages to be even weirder, and even more abstract in both its presentation and its execution. The game takes places across multiple timelines, all set either before, during or after the events of the first game. The game will also have you playing multiple different characters across these timelines, and it's all told in a crazy, non-linear format that can be pretty hard to follow but is certainly pretty gripping. There's certainly more story than there was in the previous game, but whether it's better is kind of a tough question. More detailed and perhaps more self-explanatory (for the most part), sure. Logical and coherent? Not really. But that is a large part of Hotline's charm and bizarre personality.
Naturally, since the game has you playing as a number of different characters, there are a number of ways to play and each character has some kind of gimmick to them. One particular character (no spoilers) has a number of different masks they can wear, all of which provide differing abilities and bonuses, whilst another character has no masks and can only use guns once they've executed enough people and entered a form of rage mode. The problem with this, however, is that only some of these characters are really fun to play, and most deviate to far from the standard, fairly simplistic model of the first game: clear out rooms of bad guys with whatever weapons you find. Some of the characters are interesting and fun to mess with for their couple of levels, such as the character who can only wield whatever weapon is chosen at the start, and a knife, which can be switched to and from at will, whilst other characters, like the aforementioned rage mode guy are interesting in concept but come off as extremely tedious and frustrating. Again, the main problem that all of these characters share is simply that they take away from, or diminish, the purity of the extremely solid Hotline core, and provide a frustrating, sometimes a little clunky experience that leaves you yearning for the one-note nature of the first game.
Another thing that left me wishing I was playing the original, was simply the sheer focus on guns. This time round the maps are considerably larger, and that means that, for the most part, a shoddy knife or a crappy pipe won't cut it. For the best chance to succeed in most levels, the game really wants you to use guns pretty much 24/7. I'm someone who much preferred using melee weapons in all their blunt, sharp or otherwise nasty glory in the first game and only really turned to guns as a last resort, or desperate last stand. The focus on guns, and range over melee, was something of a disappointment to me, and, although you could exclusively use melee weapons (and I'm sure someone will), you're at a big disadvantage if you don't pack some firepower, and it's pretty clear the game intends that from the very beginning. The first game had a desperate feel to it. An almost DIY, scavenger-like flow to the combat and the levels. You'd find a gun, exhaust its ammo, throw it away and move onto the next weapons immediately. It felt like the developers not only rewarded creativity in execution, but encouraged it. Something which I felt was sorely missing from HM 2.
Furthermore, the game simply feels a little confused at times. Unsure of what it wants to be, a fresh new invention or a simple iteration. Mechanically, for the most part, the game appears to want to harken back to what made the first game so special and so incredibly fun, but many of the game's implementations of such mechanics, as well as the introduction of its new systems, feel a lot more experimental and risky. In ways that feels completely at odds with each other, though, making so much of the game feel convoluted and confused, rather than tight and pure in its design, as the first was.
Moreover, the game features a number of masks, which essentially provide a character with a particular bonus or ability, and many of these masks are considerably more interesting and more impactful than those in the first game. For example, one of my personal favourite masks allows the player to essentially control two characters at once, one who wields a chainsaw and another who uses whatever guns he can find (but only guns). Movement-wise, the player only control the chainsaw guy whilst the guy packing firepower follows behind, but the game's aiming reticle is shared between both characters, creating the opportunity for simultaneous ranged and melee assault. Does it work perfectly? No. Sometimes the gun guy can get stuck on walls or simply fail to match your line-of-sight, and sometimes controlling two characters just becomes too confusing to handle. But it's certainly unique, and fun to mess around with, and that's what matters.
The problem I have with all this, then, is that there only a small amount of levels that allow you to even use such masks, probably about a third of the levels (there are 25 in total). The fundamental problem this creates is that, alongside making me wish I could use the damn things more often, it makes the whole concept of masks feel pointless and completely shoe-horned in. As if the developers didn't want to include them but felt obligated because they were popular in the previous game, which is exactly how I felt about a lot things in HM 2. They just felt poorly thought out.
That's not to say Hotline Miami 2 is completely without positives, however. The game maintains the wonderfully vivid visual style and fantastically booming soundtrack, the strange, mesmerising atmosphere, and the incredibly ambiguous storyline. The core gameplay is tight, fast and extremely addictive, in that exact way that made the first game so great. It's easy to get into that Hotline Miami trance as you die over and over to the incredible music and mind-melting visuals. I just wish there was more of that feeling.
So, is it better than the first game? No, not by quite a margin. It lacks the purity of just straight murdering fools to a catchy beat and some eye-watering visuals. Hotline Miami 2 trades this purity for a more ambitious but generally less cohesive game whose ambition can sometimes impede on the aforementioned purity that made the first Hotline Miami so incredibly mesmerising. That's not to imply that Hotline Miami 2 is in any way a mess, or even close to being a bad game, however, but some of its ideas just don't flow well together, or simply fall flat. However, between the game's vivid visual style, excellent soundtrack, and incredible pace Hotline Miami 2 are all still, in a word, entrancing.
