The original Hotline Miami walloped the gaming industry upside the head upon release in 2012. What, with its fierce, memorable score, insanely bizarre plot, and unrelenting, violent mechanics, it surprised and enthralled people looking for a particular kind of experience with its faux-retro games.
Set against an 80s neon backdrop that was equal parts homage and pure creation, Hotline Miami played like a crazy puzzle game instead of its nominal “action shooter” label. Lots of games operate under the reputation of extreme violence, but Hotline Miami followed through with it. Players could bludgeon, slice, and shoot thousands of enemies in what proved to be one of the most rewardingly challenging games of the last few years.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is the much-anticipated sequel to its predecessor, and it is a more refined but still extraordinarily strange gaming experience.
For the most part, it picks up right where the previous one left off, both narratively and mechanically, and though it manages to be equally (which is to say not) coherent, this game has plenty to offer for fans of the original who just want more violence, pulsing electro tunes, and wild gunfights.
It is impossible to write about Hotline Miami 2 without comparing it, directly and indirectly, to the original. It does what every smart but not necessarily good sequel does: it reprises everything the original did and ramps everything up to an almost comical degree. Even the music seems to go a little bit crazier than the first game, and that’s saying something.
It’s difficult to imagine a soundtrack more indicative of a game’s identity than the original’s, but the music for Hotline Miami 2 ups the ante. It is thematically more keyed up, and the mood and tone couldn’t have been more spot-on. I do miss some of the songs from the first — the ones from Sun Araw, specifically — but this one has plenty to keep players interested.
The sequel’s story is built entirely around the events of the first game, and several plot threads overlap with the overall narrative of Hotline Miami, so it’s not easy to get over the sense that this is a twin instead of the younger sibling. I’m not sure I could totally ruin the game for more casual fans of the first, because I never felt entirely apprised of what was happening in the first place, but for the sake of spoilers, I’ll only discuss plot in the most general of terms.
Structurally, this game plays out in segments that occur before and after the events of the original, and the levels are denoted by VHS cassettes that evoke the time period. It’s a striking but also quite smart way of giving players a sense of who might be telling this part of the story, but I’ll sort of get to that in a second.
There is no Jacket this time around. Instead, Hotline Miami 2 is populated with multiple protagonists, whose own narrative arcs exist in spaces tangential to — and right in the middle of — the original. Still, the spectre of the first game’s “hero” can be felt throughout.
If you pay close attention, you’ll recognize some direct and oblique homages to the first game. In fact, though I never quite caught on to the entirety of the story — I’m mostly obsessed with the controls for this game — even I caught most of what I was supposed to get out of the allusions.
In addition, the rogues gallery of playable characters provides the game with both narrative and gameplay variety. Each of the ostensible narrators is outfitted with a specific mask, which is to say ability, and so the tactic to complete each level is not always “go fast and kill chumps quickly.”
You might be limited to violently punching guys — and the game is almost exclusively guys — or comboing with a chainsaw / gun tandem team, which allows you some amount of freedom for how to proceed.
The mechanics have remained essentially the same, but the difficulty has been ramped way up, especially in the game’s latter half. I would say this one is way more puzzle-y than the previous game, and you’ll probably be less likely to just rip your way through each level than before, due in large part to the game’s difficulty. It is just as unforgiving, but there seem to be more enemies per level, and the levels themselves feel longer than before.
For instance, I was prone to memorizing the levels and character movements, just to be on the safe side, which is not something I remember having to do with the first game. Still, there were points in HM2 where I got pretty stuck doing a slow, calculated run, so I had to go all John Wick on it in order to see how and where I was going wrong.
That’s one of the beautiful things about this game. It can mostly be finished through one method or the other — Rambo or Sam Fisher — but there are points that will force you out of your comfort zone in order to complete a scene.
The last few levels require a thumb-blistering combination of stealth and bullet spraying madness for players to reach the end, and it’s both maddening and exhilarating to stand among the heap of bodies and look down at your accomplishment.
To put a finer point on it: as it progresses, Wrong Number gets insanely difficult. Really, that’s okay, because it manages to train to the player to learn its internal logic and uber-precise mechanics. A problematic outcome of this strategy in designing the game arises when players are asked to perfect increasingly lengthy and challenging levels. Any fan of the series knows the margin for error is laughably low.
Though there’s some iteration on the admittedly great ideas of the first game, part of me thinks this one isn’t quite ambitious enough. It very well could have experienced more growing pains than it does, and though it is certainly pushing the series forward with its interconnected storylines, and beyond some gimmicky touches — dual wielding guns — the mechanics are seemingly undernourished for what could have been a huge statement of this franchise’s legacy.
My complaints are relatively mild, however. What I wanted out of Hotline Miami 2 was more Hotline Miami, and that is precisely what I got. It’s a slightly more complex version of the original, and though it isn’t a huge leap forward, it is certainly not to be discounted, either.
The Final Word: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number plays to its strengths and is more Hotline Miami, which, if you’re a fan of it, is precisely what you’ll want to hear.
