Posted March 15, 2015
It's time for Hotline Miami's fanbase to admit something to ourselves: the sequel is awful.
No, it's not because of the bugs. Bugs can be fixed. What cannot be fixed is a game which has forgotten what made its predecessor so popular.
Hotline Miami succeeded because it was a very tight game - quick and dirty melee in a claustrophobic environment. Combined with a minimalist plot, you've got a nice, visceral action game that keeps the pace and the combo meter going.
But Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number went back on everything which made the original worthwhile. Close encounters with the enemy were swapped for long, drawn out gunfights with people off-screen. Improvisation was swapped for memorization. And a scant narrative was swapped for a bloated, half-baked, overly wordy, and utterly self-indulgent script.
If HM1 was inspired by the movie Drive, then HM2 must have been inspired by trench warfare.
In the end, Hotline Miami 2 was an utter waste of time, money, and effort - both to the developer and the fanbase. If anything redeeming comes out of this game, it will be the user-made levels. But the credit will be to them, and not Dennaton Games.
No, it's not because of the bugs. Bugs can be fixed. What cannot be fixed is a game which has forgotten what made its predecessor so popular.
Hotline Miami succeeded because it was a very tight game - quick and dirty melee in a claustrophobic environment. Combined with a minimalist plot, you've got a nice, visceral action game that keeps the pace and the combo meter going.
But Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number went back on everything which made the original worthwhile. Close encounters with the enemy were swapped for long, drawn out gunfights with people off-screen. Improvisation was swapped for memorization. And a scant narrative was swapped for a bloated, half-baked, overly wordy, and utterly self-indulgent script.
If HM1 was inspired by the movie Drive, then HM2 must have been inspired by trench warfare.
In the end, Hotline Miami 2 was an utter waste of time, money, and effort - both to the developer and the fanbase. If anything redeeming comes out of this game, it will be the user-made levels. But the credit will be to them, and not Dennaton Games.