Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

Hotline Miami 1 was awesome. It was a breath of fresh air in the style of arcadey ultraviolence set to an amazing soundtrack. Simple, but concise and incredibly engaging.
Hotline Miami 2 feels like at all times it hates you, the player, and is taunting you to stop playing.
The level design is just bad comparatively, putting a much higher emphasis on gun combat, but giving enemies massive open areas with sightlines out of your view range, so far too often are you just spraying bullets hoping you kill whoever's shooting back first.
The plot has a lot of things going on but ultimately results in nothing
The 'point' seems to be nonexistent since most concepts aren't fleshed out enough to reach any kind of meaning, and so many are started and then dropped immediately.
Just watch Jacob Geller's video on it.

I still have some amount of respect for the game, because such a blatant misanthropic design philosophy is kind of hilarious, and I guess me and everyone else clamoring for more Hotline Miami got their monkeys paw wish, but it still just isn't enjoyable to play.

A way more fleshed-out experience compared to the first.
A sequel that, while not reinventing the wheel in terms of gameplay and mechanics, doesn't just "feel like more of the same" - although there's a few negatives that come along with that. Some fans of the first Hotline Miami may turn their nose up to it, but they probably just wanna play more Tony levels.

Hotline Miami 2 is a very, very good game. I can see why people might complain about difficulty, overly pretentious story, or level design, but I don’t think they’re actually all that bad. The gameplay can be frustrating but it can also be incredibly exciting - that feeling of getting a full combo on Dead Ahead after hours of trying or getting an S on Take Over is something that the first game couldn’t at all seem to match. There’s something special about the game that just draws me in.

Also, the story is actually pretty good! I think it’s very good, anyways. The whole point of it is to not give you a satisfying ending - all the pretentiousness, all the morals and such, none of it really matters in the end. That’s the point. And I also LOVE this soundtrack. Castanets, who made the track that is put over the credits during the ending scene, have become one of my favorite bands as of late.

So, yeah, good game. Great game, even - one of my favorites ever.

Very very near perfect. It improved on almost every aspect of the first game like the soundtrack, gore, gameplay, storyline, visuals, and much much more. It's fantastic but the only problem I end up having with it is some of the levels I don't really enjoy mainly being the missions you play as Beard. These levels just don't feel like Hotline Miami to me. Hotline Miami is all about being flexible with your weapon usage but these levels restrict that by locking you into a gun of your choosing and a knife. It's just a little disappointing with these levels and not as fun as the others. I have put many more hours into this game than HM1 though because as mentioned earlier I like many things about this game more. It's just that had it not been for those Beard levels, this game would have been a 1o/10 for me. Also, the infinite possibilities of the map editor is awesome and provides a sense of timelessness to the game.

9/10

THIS GAME, I love to death, it is up there with some of my most favorite games of all time and I expect that to never change.
This game is responsible for me finding some of my favorite musical artists, and even made my persona online. What you get here is an amazing, extremely well written story, mixed with enthralling levels, all the while you get one of the best soundtracks known to man. Your ass will be curb-stomped by this game, but it is all worth it, the euphoria you feel after completing a hard level is just amazing.

You also have literally endless play-ability with this game thanks to the steam version having a workshop, where you and players can make entire campaigns for the game.

In summary, I fucking love this game.

After the excellent HM1 I thought that the Swedish duo Dennaton really had talent, but this game pretty much proves that the HM1 that I love so very much was nothing more than lightning in a bottle and that they just happened to stumble upon something good.
I won't talk about the story too much, I'll just say that I enjoyed it (as much as you can enjoy vidya plot), despite the pretentiousness and general lack of direction (the "throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks" method, in this case a lot of things stick but it's all disjointed and with a few weak spots).
The gameplay however is a travesty. HM1 wasn't the most mechanically rich or complex top down shooter, but you could always use its few gameplay systems in tandem and switch between them, while offering a decent amount of freedom/creativity and a decent level of challenge in certain cases. Its biggest problem was the short lenght, something that this game would have fixed outright if they didn't so spectacularly fuck the gameplay up.

Now, what do you think HM's gameplay is about? Guns, executions, melee weapons, throwing stuff, baiting enemies, stealth. Take all of those and eliminate every single one of them except for baiting and you got yourself a shit sequel. How does the game accomplish this? By nerfing every other strategy and buffing that one.
Here's a short list of the gameplay changes that made this possible:
-enemies have their reaction time halved and can spot you from farther away, making melee impractical unless the distance between you and the enemy is very short
-enemies hear gunshot more consistently and from farther away, while moving faster than in HM1
-guns are less accurate, meaning that sniping from afar is often ill advisable
-projectiles are slower, so peeking out of corners is safer
-executions are slower, making them more risky
-weapons thrown stop after one enemy and don't bounce off walls, making them much less useful (especially for Jake)

And voilà. So now, instead of having multiple strategy for different runs (high score, speedrun, challenge runs or general safety) you just have two options. You either bait enemies by peeking behind corners or by shooting, creating a conga line and killing them while they approach you, or memorizing the spawns and the layout so well that you'll need to play each level for at least 5 hours (assuming you don't want to restart the trial and error process everytime you replay a level). The first strat is used in every single type of run, and basically kills the game's potential depth.
The gameplay changes wouldn't have been so bad on their own, but there are two other elements to topple off this dumpster fire. The first one is level design. Almost every level feels the same, big square room with smaller square rooms inside which don't connect to anything, and lots of windows. It's very rare for rooms to connect to one another, and most of these levels feel like they were designed in a couple of hours. Fill these huge, omogenous maps with mooks with guns and you have the tipical HM2 level. Neeless to say that this type of layout does nothing but reinforce the baiting strategy and the trial and error needed to beat the stage. If you think for even one moment that you might be able to be aggressive and do something fun prepare to be shot offscreen by a group of gunmen. It doesn't get better than this.
The only saving grace is that you will sometimes need to adapt since some enemy move in a random pattern, and the guns they get are also random, so there can be some fun found in that, but it's not nearly enough to make up for the huge loss of depth (they basically traded a proactive type of gameplay for an almost entirely reactive one). Also enemies are completely silent, just like the first game, so you only have your limited FoV as an indication of incoming danger. They added a sound for dogs that spotted you, they could have done the same for human enemies. This would have also added to the reaction based gameplay they wanted so much for this game.
But ok, fine. You want to make a pure top down shooter instead of a game which has an ecletic mix of melee and ranged weapons like HM1? Fine. You want to have huge levels filled with fast gunmen? Fine, but at the very fucking least change/buff some core mechanics, add new stuff. Nothing, except for a couple of shitty gimmick masks and the ability to see as far as the George mask from the first game (the game might have actually be unplayable without this change). Bravo. It's even worse than this actually, since they removed some stuff too, like standing execution and the hostage mechanic (which could have been fleshed out more in the sequel). This is like if NG2 Ryu was the same as NG1 Ryu but with stronger UTs.

This is the biggest problem with the game, but it's far from the only one. The masks are limited by level and most of them don't fit the new (shitty) playstyle, and others are just flat out better than others (this was also a problem with HM1, but there all the masks were always available and there were multiple great ones), gutting the replayability. Also half of the time you don't even have a choice, and have to play as Richard like characters but with worse executions.
The levels are not only bland design wise, but also visually. Despite being bigger, the maps use the same textures for a lot of stuff (the Hawaii levels in particular are an eyesore).
The game is buggy as fuck. Broken hitboxes, broken and inconsistent AI, softlocks and much more. You expect a sequel to fix the bugs from the original, not to have more of them.
There is still no priority system for weapon pickups, so you'll often pick empty guns and shit you don't want.
Some floors become ridiculously difficult if you enter them with the wrong weapon, adding even more randomness (you are not guaranteed to get a good weapon from enemies everytime) and trial and error.
Speaking of weapons, while the melee ones are mostly the same (like HM1), the guns all suck except for two, the AK and the Mendoza, which dominate the game with their low fire rate (less waste) and big magazines. This is magnified in Hard Mode, since guns have even less ammo, making the gap between them even bigger.
The game introduces more enemy types, but these just box you in even more instead of allowing for more creative takedowns. The cool new enemies (like the Gang leader and SWAT Chief) are just used once, because Dennaton are hacks.
They also removed random weapons from the floor of the levels, because they were too fun I guess.
The scoring system is basically the same as the first game but with longer combo windows and ridiculous high rank requirements, so getting an high combo is the only way to get S ranks (compared to the first game where you could get A+ in a number of ways).

Lastly I want to talk about Hard mode, which is always a good idea to implement in action oriented games. The premise is also not bad, flipped levels and remixed enemy placement. Unfortunately, like everything else in the game, the execution of it sucks. In Hard you'll encounter even more special enemies, which (like I said earlier) just limit your playstyle more. The lack of lock on makes the game mechanically harder, but it makes it harder to identify off screen threats. The ammo nerf is also a decent idea, but it applies everytime you pick up a gun, so you are discouraged to ever throw guns or to cycle through them before emptying one, limiting you further. The mode also adds windows in certain levels; I won't say why this is a bad thing, you should be able to figure it out by now.

The game also comes with a level editor, which despite the bugs is pretty good. There's a lot of good fan-made content out there, much better than the original game anyway.
The only undeniably good part of this whole mess is the soundtrack. Longer and more inconsistent than the first game, but with higher highs.

HM2 is what happens when creators lose focus of what made their other work great. Hotline Miami didn’t need a more complex narrative (which I assume is what they spent the most time on in 2 since the levels feel so rushed) or a more punishing difficulty, just more levels.
This game has honestly more in common with Cat Mario than Hotline Miami. Overreliance on trial and error and no gameplay depth. At least it has a better soundtrack.