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This review and its screenshots have harsh language and is considered NSFW (it is an M-rated game). This review also contains spoilers (come on, the game's almost a decade old!)

I liked Hotline Miami. I ended up buying the sequel on Steam recently, because if you like the original game (a lot of people did), then try the sequel. That...was a mistake. It's a prime example of how not to do a sequel. There are many ways to ruin a sequel but it wasn't RUINED, per se, just an inferior title. For example, one complaint I read about the game was the tendency of many of the levels to have big open spaces, meaning that you could think it's mostly clear and then by sniped by someone you didn't even see, and I did experience that in the early levels.

Hotline Miami 1, in contrast, shows you maps of the buildings in its level intros so you can kind of know what you're looking for, but it's not just the hallway issues that plague Hotline Miami 2. If you play like an assassin and figure out safe points, it means your time bonus craters to zero as you try to carefully scope out where the snipers are by just shooting wildly and watching out for windows, I got stuck clipping in doors several times (this was a bug noted on release and never fixed, apparently).

It's kind of more of the same, but worse. A narrative that tries to explain things too much, too many gimmicks, courses that are far too long, and so forth. All common problems with sequels, and like all of them, doesn't make it fun. A sequel takes the same mechanics and improves them, sometimes taking advantages of better graphics, even if the final product gets a bit too ahead of itself or is otherwise rough around the edges. Let's look at other previously reviewed games. Donkey Kong Country 2. Improvement. SimCity 2000. Big improvement. Yoot Tower. A little rough around the edges (at least the localization) but still, improvement.

Much like Yoshi's Island DS it suffers from stages that are too long and ALSO like Yoshi's Island DS it made me want to stop playing it and play the original, which I did, and it still holds up. That's what the other things about Hotline Miami 1, is it has a cool concept and works without overstaying its welcome. I didn't write a full review for And Yet It Moves (it is not even in the review backlog) but I mentioned that in the review for Hammerfight that it almost lost its appeal before the game was completed.

There's some levels that are absolutely BS in difficulty, like ways to get screwed mid-level and requiring a restart from the first sequence, and I suppose I could go on about a few other things, like how the game is still blisteringly violent but there's an option to turn off one scene that refers to rape, or on that note, why a few of the protagonists are women but none of the enemies are...and on the plus side, it has some rockin' synthwave music like its predecessor (even more of it!), so there's that, I guess.

The storyline also tries to over-explain itself, with exploring it as an alternate history where we went to war with the Soviets at some point but they didn't pull out the nukes yet (though engaging in a ground war in Hawaii in 1985), retconning a few elements like how "Jacket", the guy from the first game, committed all those murders, but didn't kill Richter (and Richter did not kill "Beard", who is retconned to be a soldier in the Soviet-American War)...but not that it matters, as the game abruptly ends after a drug-fueled "boss level" and everyone dies in a nuclear explosion. It's not like the game had likable characters in any level played (except for Beard, maybe, and the writer); it's like a "fuck you" to anyone who thought the setting was interesting.

I gave this one a "Meh" given how many issues I had with it when it came to the levels and scoring itself (despite strong points with the soundtrack). It's not too harsh, I'm just not being charitable like what I did for Beyond a Steel Sky.

FINAL RATING:   

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