With Hotline Miami 2 everything that didn't work with the acclaimed predecessor takes center stage. The trial and error stealth fighting is expunged in favor of continuous, drawn-out, boring-ass gunfight, with enemies killing you from outside the screen even if you play (and it's impossible not to) with the L-Shift button constantly pressed. As a result the difficulty is completely artificial, and the game is a chore to play even despite the amazing art style and music.
Hotline Miami is challenging and very fun when the level design allows it, but unfortunately it fails when it tries to ramps up the difficulty in all the wrong ways. Rather than making the game harder with creativity and ingenuity, the developers' idea of "making harder levels" simply consists in hiding enemies with guns in the distance, so that you can get shot from outside the screen sistematically. This terrible mistake has the side effect of killing your freedom to approach the level in a creative way, and forces you to play using trial and error and repeating successful patterns until you finally make it after a couple tries. At this point playing the game becomes a chore, and you find yourself using always the same masks and doing the same things over and over again, wasting the enormous potential offered by the plethora of available weapons, masks and enemies. This is even more evident when it comes to the boss fights, which can be won only using a single, monotonous hit and run strategy, preemptively killing any freedom of approach. In conclusion, Hotline Miami not only nailed perfectly the aestethic and the soundtrack, but also had a very promising engine with great potential to bring a breath of fresh air in the stealth genre, but decided to waste it all because of a lazy or rushed level design.
