The idea, but not the execution. HM1 allowed for combo chains because you could burst into a room and melee several enemies in a short span of time. HM2 forces you to camp, waiting for enemies to pass in front of those glass windows which are just copypasted all over the level design. And you can't just rush into a room because the enemy's turning speed is faster than your strafe.

I never found it challenging. I found it annoying. Beating Hotline Miami 2 is easy enough if you know the dominant strategy, which becomes obvious after the second or third mission. Not once have I been forced to adopt a new strategy. You can get through the entire game, netting some pretty high scores, by using guns as noisemakers to lure enemies around corners.

The theme of the first game was the player's relationship to the mechanics. HM1 was actually asking you, the player, whether or not you cared about narrative, and concluded that story was basically unnecessary. It's why the story had such a non-ending, even if you collected all the secret letters.

Hotline Miami 2 made the mistake of actually focusing on the lore of the world, which sucks because none of the characters were given personalities. Everyone is the same joyless, mask-wearing psychopath. They don't have motivations.

No, instead it just penalizes you for you using melee. Which is funny, since the entire first game is based around a handful of close-quarters action scenes in "Drive."

The first game achieved both recklessness and combo-chaining. HM2 is just poorly balanced, and wasn't playtested.

THANK YOU +1 +10 +10,0000 it is amazing how many people still to this day think that Hotline Miami had an inherently meaningful story.

And +1 for the rest of your extremely accurate post too.

From what I can gather from reading this and other posts about HLM2, the main reason some people don't like it is purely because it's not HLM.

Personally I commend the developers for not taking the lazy approach and just essentially making more levels for the first game. They could have done that... I'm sure it wouldn't have taken them very long to churn out a few more levels, take the money and grin. Instead they have been brave and tried to do something a bit different. They've tried to change things up a bit, make things a bit more interesting, mix things around with different storylines.

I say well done to them. I think I would have been a bit bored with what would have been basically a HLM expansion pack, had they just carried on with the same old thing.

Can't contribute much, because all Cons (and Pros!) have already been discussed. I'm really missing the soundtrack! I bought the deluxe edition and thought I'd get some of the very outstanding music with it...yeah well a 6 track EP wich is kinda nice, but I'm missing out on the titles, that I really liked.

Precisely. I for once welcome the change. It picks up where the first game left off - in terms of story and gameplay. That's not "Terrible Period". Everyone has simply their own opinion about it. And that's even referenced in the game which is hilarious. :)

No, they disliked it because it's dysfunctional. It's unbalanced, it's slow, and it wasn't thoroughly playtested.

Ah, but you see, they did take the lazy approach, and shipped an unfinished product. Not only was its story and mechanics completely half-baked, but it came riddled with bugs! Mac users couldn't even play the damn thing, and those of us who could were met with enemies whose sight and hearing was completely broken, dogs spinning in circles, mouse movement issues, and the rest.

Well everyone's entitled to their own opinions, and based on the multitude of different hardware configurations out there, everyone is going to experience different issues.

I'm playing it on the Mac and installed the original version when it was released. So not ALL Mac users "couldn't play the damn thing." The only issue I had was with the achievement crash bug, which I was able to play around.

As I said, everyone's entitled to their own opinions... everyone is different. It's what makes the world interesting. I respect that you thought the game was terrible. I disagree with you. Neither of us are right, while at the same time we are both right in our own minds.

Can't really say more than that.

Even if you can play the game you cannot deny how buggy it is. Don't even bother trying.

No, it is not. It is fucking A.

I can play the game and could always do so, and, apart from the DRM-free 1.02 first version crashing on startup, I haven't encountered a single game-breaking bug yet. Of course I can't deny the game is seriously bugged on Mac, especially, hundreds of Mac users can't be all wrong, but *it is* working great on Windows, at least on my end.

I understand you being frustrated with the game, but I wouldn't go as far as telling people not to bother trying playing it, it's a great game, sure, different from the first one in some aspects, but it's still your visceral, high octane Hotline Miami experience. It may have put some of the fanbase off, but it catered to the needs and wants of a lot of us, as well. Because, you know?, the Hotline Miami fanbase isn't all the same and some of us weren't really hoping for a Hotline Miami 1 Expansion Pack, we really wanted a new game that expanded on the first and offered a different experience, and that's what Dennaton gave us.

Sure, I've encountered the occasional spinning dog and the levels are harder because they're bigger and, therefore, require you to plan ahead, also, the shift look was a bit clunky in version 1.01 (it has been addressed in 1.02, and I'm sure more patches will be coming out in the near future, though), but none of that is or was game-breaking, for me, I still highly recommend Hotline Miami 2, whether you're a fan of the first or not I say give it a go, it truly is an awesome game and absolutely worth the bother trying.

All that because you misread "don't even bother trying" to be about playing the game, when it was clearly said to not bother trying to argue that the game isn't buggy.

And so you accidentally went and proved my point anyway. Thanks!

PS: Next time read the entire thread before pontificating in such a self absorbed way. You look goofy.

I don't consider this to be a bug... dogs chase their tails all the time :D

I didn't "accidentally" prove your point, you're right: the game is bugged; not bugged for me or for most Windows users, but bugged nonetheless. And I honestly thought you were saying people shouldn't even bother trying to play the game, not that they shouldn't bother trying to prove your buggy game argument wrong, and for that I apologize.

English isn't my native language and, therefore, more often than not, I'm prone to misunderstanding and misinterpreting what natives intend to express, sorry if that makes me come across as goofy.

Ok cheers, no problem mate. It's all good, we're all here to play games and have fun after all, right? :)

I think they're going for a Quentin Tarantino sort of thing to some extent with all of the expendable characters dying randomly and stupidly, but you don't always know in advance who that is. Except there's a lot of foreshadowing.

I still have to finish the game, though. I got several levels in, and there's one level where you can die after you've "won" and then you have to replay the level. It's also the level with one of the most obnoxious kill-you-before-you-can-see-them enemies I've had to deal with in a long time. It's hard to scout for him, even with the Shift key.

The game could have been better balanced with a different flow if the HUD somehow were more fair about this.

On a side note, I had no idea Jacket's ending was canon. I thought he hallucinated 50% of what happened before meeting Biker and 99% of what happened after. In particular, I thought "ninja girl" was a dream version of Jacket's girlfriend, and that Jacket's ending was his way of having his life end on a hallucinated movie-style high note. Guess I was wrong...