Looking at: Hotline Miami 2

Ring Ring

Brief moments of calm break up the non-stop action.

It once took SBnation writer and destroyer of EA Sports games Jon Bois 344 tries to pull off the impossible. Occasionally playing through Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number felt similar to that, struggling to pull off the impossible, always just an inch away from victory. You don't throw footballs in Hotline Miami 2, however, unless they're directed at some poor bastard's head.

As a followup to the 2012 indie darling, HM2 certainly has some big shoes to fill. It fleshes out the story, changes up the gameplay, and adds some new touches, but is this a phone call worth answering?

Prerecorded Message

The blood and gore have been increased from the original to incredible proportions. 

Gameplay is unchanged, as it should be. HM2 controls from a top down perspective and your goal is to kill everyone that isn't you in a given level. You'll have access to a variety of weapons and ways to do this ranging from guns, to knives, bats, and chains. Sometimes. More on that in a bit.

Action is brutal and breakneck, with most levels only lasting a few seconds. The trick is that you die in one hit, be it rifle fire or a lead pipe, so completing a level requires a perfect run. You're also scored on your performance, creating a purposely uncomfortable mixture of rush tactics and the desire to stay put and plan out strategies. That's where dying comes into play.

Not unlike Dark Souls before it, death is used as a mechanic in HM2, albeit sans the story explanation. Restarting a chapter is instantaneous, and clearing a section can take dozens and dozens of attempts as you learn and plan your way around.

One New Voicemail

HM2 never shies away from controversy. 

The gimmick in HM2 is that, unlike the first game you play as a cast of characters, rather then one psychopath wearing different masks. Each character has different abilities that change how they play, although there are a number of milquetoast "normal" characters. There's Corey the Zebra that can roll dodge and use windows, Tony the Tiger that eschews weapons in favor of his fists, Mark the Bear wields a pair of SMGs that he can fire in two directions, and most interestingly are Alex and Ash two characters that control as one using guns and a chainsaw. There's also a writer that goes for non-lethal takedowns, a mysterious cop, a soldier and a repentant mobster. Each character handles slightly differently and figuring out which one to use is important.

Or it would be if HM2 was designed a little better, ie. more like the first game. Hotline Miami 2 has a bigger focus on it's story this time around, a welcome change from the first game, but what this actually means is that your freedom is limited more often then it should be. There are a handful of levels that let you run wild at your leisure, but most of the time you'll be told exactly which character to use, and trying to deviate will all but render the level impossible. That's only the first of my issues with this sequel.

Wrong Number

HM2 flips back and forth between fact and fiction, and you're never quiet sure which is which.

The level design of the first HM was damn near perfect, offering constant mixtures of long hallways, short openings, and huge wide-open areas that forced you to constantly react and rethink on the fly. What it usually did best was allow you to figure out how to proceed, letting you pick your path of destruction. HM2 doesn't do this so much, with most of the levels being scarily linear, and with hallways that are way to long so that you get shot from an enemy you couldn't see. When the levels do work they work gangbusters, but this doesn't happen nearly enough.

That sightline issue I mentioned is a real problem, and bleeds into another issue I have with HM2: it's reliance on guns and it's unwillingness to let you use them. Some character can't use guns whatsoever, and Tony the Tiger can't even pick up weapons to throw. That might be fine except that the levels are all bigger and more often then not strangely designed for guns. I didn't like using guns in the first game, since I found they cheapened the experience, but here it was either go in double barrels or use plan B over and over again. Plan B was to expose myself for a second, wait until the idiotic AI rushed me, then take them down in melee. Effective, but it really fucked up my level score.

You can still shift-look in HM2, that is holding down the Shift key to extend your range, but I often found myself over-using this and got annoyed when the level didn't let me extend further. The default field of view quickly became to small and constrained and I struggled to see and mark targets effectively from a distance.

The AI was always inept in Hotline Miami, but now they seem especially off-base. Enemies would either run straight at me in a murderous rage, or spin around in a circle for no reason. I've lost count of how many dogs I've seen spinning like tops. Worse is that the designers seem to think that more enemies means a higher difficulty setting, and you'll always find yourself completely overwhelmed. This does, of course, encourage more tactical gameplay as you separate enemies and take them down in manageable numbers, but you'll likely lament at the amount of times you've killed one guy with a crowbar only to instantly be taken down by his buddy beside him.

The biggest issue I had with HM2 was it's constant inconsistency. Enemy weapons are randomized, as well as their movement paths, which made proper planning very difficult. What happened the last four tries didn't happen on try #5, and only half happened on #6, meaning that I was never really able to plan my advance leading to more unnecessary deaths then I can count. This isn't a stealth game, I realize, but I do approach HM2 like a puzzle game, and that's difficult to do when it doesn't remain constant from attempt to attempt.

Click

The insidious phone calls from the first game are back, although less frequently.

It might sound like I didn't like HM2, and at some points while playing the game I think I didn't either. The truth is, though, I do like HM2, but only in short bursts. I found if I played only a level or two at a time I could sort of put up with the game's bullshit, and the feeling of accomplishment for actually pulling off a perfect run is unbeatable. You feel like a god for that briefest of moments and it's a dangerous rush because you'll want it again and again.

I haven't yet mentioned the soundtrack, which is probably the only part of the game improved on since the first one. That's saying something, since HM had one of the sickest, most enjoyable soundtracks ever put into a videogame. There's a lot of what made the first game great, with heart pounding tracks layered in with smooth calming beats. HM2 also starts moving towards the rock end of the spectrum, fitting as the game itself moves into the early 90's, and you hear more variety in the music then the first game.

Hotline Miami 2 isn't a bad game, and in many ways it's not even a bad sequel. Everything that made the first game great is here, but it's often buried under the desire to make HM2 something it isn't. There's to much filler pushed in beside the goodness of the core game, and it brings the experience as a whole down because of it. I enjoyed my time with HM2, but I don't know if I'd actually recommend it, at least not until a few patches and the promised level-designer feature release. Perhaps, for now, this is a message best left unanswered.