This collection includes the indie darling Hotline Miami and its sequel. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the sequel is so bad, it spoils the memory of the first episode.
The first game, Hotline Miami, is good. In 2020, it already feels like a product from the early times of indie gaming: rough around the edges and brutal, like a middle finger to triple A gamingThis collection includes the indie darling Hotline Miami and its sequel. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the sequel is so bad, it spoils the memory of the first episode.
The first game, Hotline Miami, is good. In 2020, it already feels like a product from the early times of indie gaming: rough around the edges and brutal, like a middle finger to triple A gaming companies. It's everything a big company wouldn't produce: a drug-soaked, demented bloodbath.
Hotline Miami is an aggression to your senses, starting with the fantastic psychedelic menu screen. The graphics are in the "so bad, it's good" category. Even with those minimalistic pixel graphics, the violence feels orders of magnitude more direct and vicious than it does in most big-budget action games. The gameplay is all about stealth and action, but sometimes it feels like a puzzle game of sorts: enter a place, then find a pattern to kill everybody in the most brutal and efficient way. It's ruthless, rough, and quick, and it all holds together pretty well.
As good as the first game is, Hotline Miami 2 is a disaster. The first game had a focused, narrow scope. The second game pumps all the dials up to 11, and loses its way in the process. The skeletal story of HM becomes a overly ambitious mess with too many characters, flashbacks and flash-forwards. The soundtrack, so essential to the first game's character, contains one too many bland loop. The tight mechanics of the first game become a spoiled broth of ideas where the additional ingredients never quite gel together.
Most importantly, Hotline Miami 2 doesn't seem to understand what makes a game fun. Like many people said before, being shot five times in a row by an invisible enemy outside the screen–well, that's not fun at all. Neither is having to use the game's auto-aim arrow to get a hint of the enemies' positions.
Beyond those glaring design flaws, however, the game gets even worse. Like in the first game, you must find patterns to clear out a room–but the patterns in HL2 are extremely finicky. Expect to restart levels from scratch dozens of times for the most maddening reasons: because you got jammed in the same door multiple times in a row, or because you pressed a button one frame too late as a dog attacked around a corner. There is even a borderline offensive "Ah, ah, you died" level that has you fighting nearly in the dark, and getting killed repeatedly by barely visible enemies. That's a maddening pile of steaming bad design decisions, coupled with a terrible enemy AI.
To be fair, HM2 is addictive in its own way. It's hard to say "no" to just another frustrated go at a failed room. However, you usually restart a room with the feeling that you've been punished unfairly, and your main concern is to right that wrong. That's a myrthless game loop, and HM2 is all about that.
Bottom line: if HM could be bought on its own, it would deserve a 7, or even an 8. The shadow cast by its failure of a sequel, however, turns this package into something that I can't recommend buying.… Expand