I'm not suggesting it's impossible to fly through Hotline Miami 2's levels-I've seen plenty of videos that show players briskly laying waste to hordes of enemies and scoring highly for their efforts-but the barrier to getting to that point is much, much higher this time around, and for my part, I didn't find it to be worth the effort. Whether by design or not, Hotline Miami 2 too often works against the kind of freeform action that made the original so compelling. You'll see enemies (especially dogs) get hung up in doorways, spinning around endlessly until you put them out of their misery. Blast a nearby foe and watch as guys from three rooms away start bolting toward you, yet the guy in the room right next to you remains unmoved. And even when you are in a seemingly functional hiding spot, there's often some guy off in the distance that manages to snipe you before you even know he's there. Level designs often go heavy on windowed rooms, scaling down the number of useful hiding places you can use to plot your next course. It's stuff like this that makes Hotline Miami 2 more often a chore than a pleasure to progress through. Sussing out each floor layout takes many, many tries, and all too often you'll find yourself splayed out on the ground because you failed to notice a shooter in a far back corner that picked you off entirely off-screen, or because a dog that happened to blend in with the dim stage lighting caught you unawares. I said in my review of Hotline Miami that its level designs were just the right length, that "were each level to drag on just a bit longer, the game would give way to irritating repetition." That's essentially what's happened in Hotline Miami 2. Nearly every stage in Hotline Miami 2 is a great deal larger than anything in the first game, and along with that increased real estate comes a greater abundance of bad guys to take out. It's why the game is more difficult that negates a lot of the fun. It's not enough to just say that Hotline Miami 2 is a more difficult game than the first. But those truly terrific moments are delivered inconsistently throughout Hotline Miami 2, and they're often book-ended by sequences that turn that psychedelic frenzy into teeth-gnashing frustration. In those moments, the visual design, pulsating beats, and breakneck action all swirl together into blood-soaked delirium, reminding you of how Hotline Miami got its hooks in you to begin with. There are moments peppered throughout the game's 26 scenes that match the level of disturbing (yet thrilling) frenzy Hotline Miami was so good at delivering. That isn't to say that Hotline Miami 2 is bereft of excitement. Pieces of it periodically capture the spirit and energy of the original game-most notably the soundtrack and art design, which are as hypnotic as ever-but just as often, Hotline Miami 2 comes across like a meandering, more verbose retread of its predecessor. Wrong Number bolts on considerable length to every element of Hotline Miami's design, and as a result feels bloated and out of sorts. This sequel is obsessed with enlarging everything about the original, often at the expense of said efficiency. This is part of what makes Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number a disappointment. Clocking in at just a few hours of play, the developers at Dennaton built Hotline Miami to be a ruthlessly efficient experience, focused primarily on getting the player in and out of each stage with minimal bullshit to distract from the core concept of blisteringly paced murdering. Hotline Miami 2 assumes the answer to that question was a resounding yes. Hotline Miami asked players if they liked hurting people. Every locale presented the player with a kind of homicidal brain teaser: What mixture of guns, melee weapons, and environmental kills can I use to most quickly eliminate every target without taking a single hit? Player death was frequent and encouraged, to the point where tapping on the level reset button morphed from repeated annoyance into reflexive action, a vital step in the game's intoxicating dance of death and dismemberment. How you went about killing everyone inside was left largely up to you. Its premise was simple: a killer receives phone messages from mysterious third parties, each instructing him to go to a place, enter, and kill everyone inside. Hotline Miami was an exquisitely nasty good time.
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