I recently played Hotline Miami 2 and found it far less fun that I remember the first game being. I'm not sure if its because of the long delay in playing them (nearly 7 years?) and the developer expected that you bring your Hotline Miami skills into 2. But I feel like I am being shot from off screen in punishing ways far more than I recall.

Yeah, 2 felt very different from the first game. A lot more off-screen gunfire due to much more open spaces than in the first game. I still love the first game and played it multiple times, but I only ever bothered finishing the sequel once.

At this rate I don't think I'll finish 2. I'm on one of the police station stages and had a good role going before getting whacked by a guy off screen. I feel like I'm repeatedly just having to shoot into the map in the hopes of killing people.

Are there any good custom content for the game or is the main story all there is?

I never tried the custom content, but there's over a hundred maps and campaigns out there, and from what I've seen they are closer to the first game in terms of design.

Honestly as much as I love the first game the second one is just a better game overall. It feels more polished and refined if that makes sense. I didn't find any faults with the level design and I actually enjoyed the more gun focused gameplay.

I always thought that people who criticized the sequel for its level design completed the first game camping around corners waiting for the enemy to come to them. It's much harder if not impossible to do that in the second game.

I like both games for different reasons to be honest. I feel like the original Hotline Miami has a better atmosphere drawing inspiration from movies like Drive and TV shows like Miami Vice while Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number just plays better.

I've also tried a few custom campaigns like the popular Hunter saga. I think I completed the first two campaigns in the series and they were pretty good. Might come back to it at some point. Some of the levels were seriously tough though but it wasn't that unfair in terms of difficulty.

I actually recently replayed a fair amount of the OG game and found the opposite. In Hotline Miami I have the freedom to flow through the map engage with challenges as they appear and keeping pace with the music. Whereas in 2 I need to constantly pause and camp before each encounter.

2 to me feels far more like a puzzle game where you enter a level and must figure out the gotcha for each section.