The first Hotline Miami was a revelation. A mix of
precision, speed and ultra-violence it pumped along to an incredible soundtrack
that pulsed through your very veins as your balletic murder spree spread red
pixels across the walls and corridors of intricately designed levels. It’s a
lot to live up to and expectation for the sequel have been high. It’s now here
and it’s probably not quite what you expect.
Unlike the original, the game now follows a number of
different characters and stories as they make their way through the neon tinged
world. It also jumps around in time to both before and after the events of the
first game. There are dream sequences, drug fuelled sequences, some of it’s a
movie – basically you’ll never really be sure what’s real and what isn’t and
that’s part of the fun.
Throughout the game you’ll play as a grizzled detective, a
soldier (who later becomes the shop owner in the first game), and a movie star
losing his mind, a writer, a group of copycat masked killers and various goons.
Most of them have something which distinguishes them from the crowd – such as
the writer not killing people or the different masks that the ‘fans’ wear
giving them different abilities. It’s a different system to that of the first
game and as a result you may feel a little more restricted in the levels.
The characters are what set each level apart here as the
design is somewhat different. Each level in the original game had something
that made it stand out. You had the train arriving, or the car smashing through
the wall of the disco. There’s even the level where the swat team charge in
half way through. Unfortunately, there is nothing like that present here and
after a while the levels do begin to blur together a bit. We can see what they
have tried to do by turning things on their head with the approach and variety
now dictated by whom you are playing but it does lose some of the magic.
Levels are also much less tight now. Many of them have wide
open spaces to traverse and your ‘look’ command will often not see to the end.
This is a real pain as a number of times we were killed by enemies we couldn’t
see and had no real way of knowing were there. It turns many of the levels into
more of a memory test which is something we really don’t like.
The new level layouts change the flow of the game as well.
You need to take a much slower and more careful approach to your slaughter as
you are never really sure what is up ahead. While this does raise tension
levels it often just ends up being frustrating. The fact you pretty much have
to carve a set route out of the enemies also doesn’t help this as you can end
up repeating the same starting actions over and over again.
The levels also go on a bit longer in the main which is
difficult when you are basically being asked to perfect run a killing spree of
thirty plus goons. You do get used to it but much of the time we really weren’t
having fun and that never happened with the original. There are also some bugs
with objects and characters getting stuck in things and the game also crashed
out on us right at the end of a very long and tricky section which made us cry
a little bit. Occasionally a level will start with the cursor stuck in the
middle of the screen as well which makes moving around interesting to say the
least.
When the game works it does do a great job of making you
feel like some kind of super hero. When you’ve got the sequence of a level down
and you know where the bad guys are you can cause some serious chain damage and
come out feeling exhilarated. It’s moments like this that you realise how good
the game can be – but there are far less of them than before.
There are also moments of crazy genius at work here. Picking
the duck mask for instance gives you two on screen characters to deal with. One
uses a chainsaw while the other uses a gun. It’s mad as you pile through
cutting and blasting and feels wonderfully unhinged. The story arc and writing
is also exceptional and once you work out what the hell is going on and how
everything links up with the original you can only admire what’s been done
here. The music is also exceptional and tracks set the scene perfectly for the
levels they are attached to.
Overall, it is fair to say that no other game has caused us
some many headaches when it has come down to working out how we feel about it.
At times we loved it and at times we really despised it. It moved from a six to an
eight and back even within the same level and at its core this is the issue –
it’s not consistent with its quality. Sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes
it’s downright bad. Fans of the original will both love and hate it in a single
play through but it does do a lot of things right. It’s a difficult one to
score. It’s both a six and an eight so we’ll take the middle ground and call it
a seven.
Overall 7/10
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