Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

ts so peak dawg 😭😭😭🙏🙏🙏🙏

Unplayable bugfest, crashing every 2 minutes.

The game plays as a complete shadow of the original. It lost all the original energy, story, and harmony of different gameplay elements coming together. Skip if you don't want to be disappointed.

In some ways, Hotline Miami 2 is better than the first in some ways, but worse in other ways. The first game featured fun, fast paced gameplay with a unique aesthetic that you don't really see too often, and was (sort of) done well. However, I felt quite uneasy playing it due to the 'Drug trip' aesthetic being too overbearing. It felt like the game was giving me a slight headache/nauseous feeling, coupled along with the music (everyone said that was a strong point of the first, I disagree slightly) which had some good tracks but mostly sounded too disorientating. It also had that damn ending stealth sequence which let the game down for me. Conversely, Hotline Miami 2 improves on the aesthetic for me. It feels like the "Drug trip" aesthetics are still there but toned down so that the game is much more playable, only being deliberately intensified when they need to be. The music for me in the second one seems to be more down-to-earth than the first game which sounded too much like one long drug trip. In general, it made me not experience the same feeling of uneasiness and it feels like the game is actually more playable as a result. Oh, and there's no horrible stealth section. Aesthetics are improved. What killed the game for me was the story, which feels much more forced on you. I managed to follow certain parts of it but for the most part it's constantly skipping between the timeline which didn't really make sense and I lost track of what was actually happening while playing. There's quite a few characters but none of them were really memorable or had very interesting personalities. There's not really a massive improvement over the first game. The AI occasionally bugs out (which I don't remember happening in the first one) and gets stuck on objects. There's not really any huge additions or new weapons. Dodge mechanics felt pretty useless. Aiming without Shift seemed sluggish. Not bad, not a massive improvement either.

Sincerely, having played both games, the first one is better, it had a better way to tell the story, and more choices in the gameplay style, but this game knows how to keep the spirit of the original, keeping the bloodshed, and the interesting narrative, while reducing the elections available in terms of gameplay. However, that's not even a negative thing, it's done for a reason, a very obvious one, and i find it well implemented. I recommend to play the first one, finish this one and ther come back to the original, since there are a lot of clever references and ties between the two.