Exuding energy similar to that of a hyperactive teenager lapping can after can of Monster energy drink, babbling incoherently and yearning for more is exactly what playing Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number feels like. Stepping into a clothes shop fettered with spinning racks, pelting on-comers with lurking bullets to their craniums, snatching a projectile and flattening brown-nosers out using a baseball bat like a rolling pin to squish them into the scenery lasagne-style as a flood of blood sieves out of their pastry, is nothing short of cathartic.
Brutality and excess gore are staples of Hotline Miami's calling card. You receive phone calls from anonymous individuals, making spurious requests, disguised as messages to reek havoc. All before selecting from your giddy band of carnival animals, ready to shred,beat,bash,smash,murder,tenderise and bludgeon 8-bit pixels into 2D carpet mats. Don't reach for your cadavers though, as the pain you inflict unto your foes can equally be visited upon you. Again and again and again, you'll meet your demise only to re-animate a second later for you to splatter yourself again and repeat until successful in reaching a checkpoint- a recipe for challenge and ballistic frolics.
Brutality and excess gore are staples of Hotline Miami's calling card. You receive phone calls from anonymous individuals, making spurious requests, disguised as messages to reek havoc. All before selecting from your giddy band of carnival animals, ready to shred,beat,bash,smash,murder,tenderise and bludgeon 8-bit pixels into 2D carpet mats. Don't reach for your cadavers though, as the pain you inflict unto your foes can equally be visited upon you. Again and again and again, you'll meet your demise only to re-animate a second later for you to splatter yourself again and repeat until successful in reaching a checkpoint- a recipe for challenge and ballistic frolics.
Hotline Miami 2 wears its trademark run and gun action on its blood-stained sleeve, turning up the volume with more bullets fired, buildings besieged and characters to control. Levels boast a richer variety thanks to a smorgasbord of character archetypes. These archetypes include a writer, a soldier, a son with a gun and the typical motley crew of anthropomorphic mask wearers similar to its predecessor. A different playstyle accompanies each, giving a sense of diversity to the proceedings. The Writer for instance refuses to murder unless instructed to do so by the player, encouraging projectile combat, even if it baffles the scoring system in the process, managing to be harder to get top grades, offering no hint on how to improve your final total. The Writer is the best of the characters, used as an example to highlight the only true sense of a positive diversion HM2 takes, away from the overcooked bullet bonanza compiling the overall majority.
You see, the biggest gripe with Wrong Number is its propensity for ranged firearms, squeezed into the mainframe of the action, as if developer Dennation games needed to create a sequel tipped towards Hollywood thrills than calming the ideas train for a bit, in order to focus on what made the first Hotline Miami a smash hit. Jungles, nightclubs, dance floors, prisons, police stations and subways are all slaughtering grounds, contextualised by the avatars you control.
This over-abundance pushes HM2's problems further, revealing a vapid sense of focus. Whereas the original was a delight courteous of its free-form ability to reek havoc everywhere, the sequel disappointingly sections off murder masks to specific areas to conduct a meandering story. The latter flits between the late 80s and early 90s, maintaining plot threads from the first game, attempting to string an abundance of written dialogue, more often failing to shed any insight, than furthering connections with any of the characters. You'll end up groaning for the game to give you control, as you'll have to revisit certain locations after you've dispatched the hordes of goons littered in each level.
You see, the biggest gripe with Wrong Number is its propensity for ranged firearms, squeezed into the mainframe of the action, as if developer Dennation games needed to create a sequel tipped towards Hollywood thrills than calming the ideas train for a bit, in order to focus on what made the first Hotline Miami a smash hit. Jungles, nightclubs, dance floors, prisons, police stations and subways are all slaughtering grounds, contextualised by the avatars you control.
This over-abundance pushes HM2's problems further, revealing a vapid sense of focus. Whereas the original was a delight courteous of its free-form ability to reek havoc everywhere, the sequel disappointingly sections off murder masks to specific areas to conduct a meandering story. The latter flits between the late 80s and early 90s, maintaining plot threads from the first game, attempting to string an abundance of written dialogue, more often failing to shed any insight, than furthering connections with any of the characters. You'll end up groaning for the game to give you control, as you'll have to revisit certain locations after you've dispatched the hordes of goons littered in each level.
Forget about comparisons to the original and the hollow story, and you'll sure savour Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number a hell of a lot more, as it's still capable of a bloody good time. Making a splattering entrance is as easy as boomeranging a faceless onlooker before crashing his head until it cracks like a scrunched pineapple. Following up with bullet swishing insta kills in numbers, and splitting them in half so you can bear witness to the blood sickening sight of entrails lying on the ground.
Controls are as responsive as before, even if targeting enemies is still annoyingly fiddly. Combos are paramount to high scores, the attached badassery remaining intact as you swoop from slacker to slacker, once again giving you a blistering action movie pace. Basically the game hasn't changed much mechanically. Some characters have the ability to perform an evasive forward roll, but it's assigned to the same face button as the executions, making for a subtle but affecting aggravation. Duel-wielding weapons makes an underutilised appearance which is sadly an ability you can use only twice in the game- meaning no picking up two different or same weapons and whipping them around like in a John Woo flick.
Undoubtedly the most enthralling facet of Hotline Miami 2 is the eclectic electronic soundtrack. As with the original, HM2 is augmented with a powerful ensemble of tunes you'll find terribly hard to ignore as you go about on your killing sprees. It's Hotline Miami 2 at its most stellar, proving the small things can make the biggest impact and the everlasting impressions.
Sequels by nature tend to make everything bigger and ballsier than they were first time out. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is proof that going beyond Rambo is too much of a risk, failing to deliver coherence to what matters- the gameplay. Too frequently HM2 bothers with telling a story, forgetting its key strengths and leaving little room to trump the original game. This isn't to say it isn't heaps of fun, as committing 50 shades of slay on suited bodies encapsulates just how devilishly extravagant it all is, but there's so much untapped potential and leftover issues from the first game that weren't addressed here. By all means play it, take it all in, but if it becomes too intoxicating, drop those placebos, drink some holy water and realise you've seen smoke and mirrors.
Controls are as responsive as before, even if targeting enemies is still annoyingly fiddly. Combos are paramount to high scores, the attached badassery remaining intact as you swoop from slacker to slacker, once again giving you a blistering action movie pace. Basically the game hasn't changed much mechanically. Some characters have the ability to perform an evasive forward roll, but it's assigned to the same face button as the executions, making for a subtle but affecting aggravation. Duel-wielding weapons makes an underutilised appearance which is sadly an ability you can use only twice in the game- meaning no picking up two different or same weapons and whipping them around like in a John Woo flick.
Undoubtedly the most enthralling facet of Hotline Miami 2 is the eclectic electronic soundtrack. As with the original, HM2 is augmented with a powerful ensemble of tunes you'll find terribly hard to ignore as you go about on your killing sprees. It's Hotline Miami 2 at its most stellar, proving the small things can make the biggest impact and the everlasting impressions.
Sequels by nature tend to make everything bigger and ballsier than they were first time out. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is proof that going beyond Rambo is too much of a risk, failing to deliver coherence to what matters- the gameplay. Too frequently HM2 bothers with telling a story, forgetting its key strengths and leaving little room to trump the original game. This isn't to say it isn't heaps of fun, as committing 50 shades of slay on suited bodies encapsulates just how devilishly extravagant it all is, but there's so much untapped potential and leftover issues from the first game that weren't addressed here. By all means play it, take it all in, but if it becomes too intoxicating, drop those placebos, drink some holy water and realise you've seen smoke and mirrors.
STORY: 5/10
GAMEPLAY: 7/10
PRESENTATION: 7/10
LIFESPAN: 6/10
SCORE: 6/10
A sequel too big for its britches, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number loses sight of what made the original great and bloats itself with too many characters and playstyles that complicate and confuse the base ingredients into a bit of a mess. Dial HM for Hotline Mediocrity.