Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

The second part clearly has been "product managed" to death. Which is a pity, because the developers actually did a nice job improving the chunky physics. Still has bugs and dead-end scripts thou. The team added redundant amount of gore and Game of Thrones style "shock content", yaawn, probably to appeal to that 11-13 year old "edgy"-boy audience. The tutorial is looong and the AI dummed down. When you get to some content that actually is good you'll ask yourself, if it was worth it and the answer will come easy. No.

You liked HM1? You want more HM? You want a continuation of the story? Get this game. As many others said, yes this game is definetely flawed in many ways. Dennaton drifed a bit too far from their original formula and make a few poor design choices along the way.

Story is shit, but I don't really care about that. Goes on too long. Has some terrible missions, but so did the first game. Overall it just feels like the first game, but missing something.

As a fan of the first one i hesitated to play this after reading the many comments on large rooms with unfair formations and bugs. They were right. The second one is designed differently, many levels can only be beaten after several rounds of practice, learning the patterns and places of the enemies (which can often not be seen as the area is even too wide to be overseen with shift). I stopped playing, would have given 2 stars. A year later i picked it up again. Now knowing what awaits me was more fun. The first one was a greater experience, but learning the levels and working on your performance, getting further with every try is also fun, just a different (maybe more oldschool) one. The story-snips are interesting and dramatic, but sometimes also a bit unconnected and maybe told too vague. Graphics and music are as good as part one. All in all it´s a good game, 3,7/5 (rounded to 4). Worth playing if you are stress resistant and prepared for many unforeseeable deaths.

Hotline Miami 2 is pretty much more of the same. The basic game is the same as the first game. The controls are nearly the same with some minor changes. To me it seems that Dennaton Games took the first game and looked into ways to make it harder while focusing a bit more on the story and lore of the Hotline Miami universe. They also made the game's story and tone much more gritty. The game spans across 6 groups of people as far as I can tell in 6 hours of game play; A curious writer, a vengeful detective, a group of vicious misguided youths, a older gangster, a fat war veteran, and a bunch of commandos in the Vietnam war. Each party has their own quirks and plays differently. The writer can't actually kill people, but he can extend his combo by unloading guns. The detective seems abit faster and can occasionally take a stray bullet, but gets no masks, the misguided youths have multiple different masks which are all very different, the Fat war vet has some nice masks but is a larger target and slower, the vietnam commando has a knife and gun at all times, but can't switch out weapons of his fallen enemies. The older gangster is like the detective but his story is kind of short. The story goes all over the place and rarely stays with one party for more than a 1 or two levels, so I found it pretty hard to follow. I replayed the first hotline miami the day before I played #2 and I found the this one to be harder than the first game with the story being far darker and more intense. If you liked the first hotline miami 1 for it's wacky story and game mechanics, you will probably enjoy hotline miami 2 as long as you don't expect it to be the exact the same as the first one. You can't rely on the same strategies which worked in the first game for all levels. About 2 out of 5 levels require a radically different approach you wouldn't normally consider in Hotline Miami 1. The Different parties you play as require different play style approaches.