This full game review comes courtesy of guest writer Carol Hood. Welcome, Carol!
The best-worst thing to ever happen to my Vita was Hotline Miami. See, no one can convince me there was a better old school beat ‘em up than Streets of Rage (1 and 2, we do not speak of 3), and Hotline Miami satisfied all my ‘late 80s/early 90s’ gaming desires. Between the hypnotic music and the eighties bright flashy coloring, I found myself addicted to killing. I’ve been gleefully awaiting the sequel, both fearful that it would not live up to its predecessor and yet in dire need of more Jacket and friends.
I downloaded it for Vita, anticipating the music, as I’m such a fan of Jasper Byrne and I could only imagine what delicious tracks he’d contributed this time around. My body was ready, and as soon as the neon lights etched across the screen and that underling beat started, I knew right then: shit’s gon’ be awesome!
Hotline Miami 2 is a worthy conclusion to the series, although the developer’s problematic choices can’t be ignored, most notably the addition of a sexual assault scene.
While developers were aware enough to include two modes in the game: One that includes sexual violence and one that doesn’t, as someone who ran through both modes I can conclude that the game would have benefitted from its absence.
The sexual violence is in the first act. You begin, you’re in a pig mask (Pig-Butcher), and a pseudo tutorial pops up, telling you how the controls work. The controls are almost innate for any Hotline Miami 1 patrons, but Pig-Butcher moves quite differently than Jacket, from his body type, to his “stomp” finishing move, unlike Jacket, who bashes heads repeatedly. He’s a bit slower to recover, making those last minute saves from oncoming onslaughts tricky.
At the top floor of this level, you find a man and woman in bed. The man is disposed of easily, but the woman stands there in her underwear, and the screen flashes: ‘Finish her’ once you comply, the assault begins—only for audiences to find out that a movie is being filmed, and all the men the Pig-Butcher has killed and the woman he assaulted are actors. It seems like cheap vindication, the whole “fiction” twist, and something that never rears its ugly head again. The scene is extraneous and uncomfortable to say the least, even in a game where morality is the least bit of your worries. I mean, you are mass murdering, so it’s hard to soapbox while bashing heads in with pipes. Regardless, there is nothing to be gained by the sexual assault scene within a scene. Playing on the mode without rape will not take away from the experience of Hotline Miami 2, but instead enhance it.
Unlike Hotline Miami 1, we are introduced to a plethora of playable characters, each of them different. The second act we’re introduced to “the Fans” at a party. The first mask is recognizable as ‘Tony’ the Tiger, who has been torn and bloodied, but you first play as Corey, who wears a Zebra mask, and here’s where things get interesting. Corey has a dodge. If you have the dexterity, you can bust into rooms, roll around bullets and take each person out one by one with a blunt object. This is great for my brashness. I am the Leeroy Jenkins of Hotline Miami, Imma just crash and take out as many people as I can before I get got.
Later we get to experience bloodied Tony the Tiger, who is punch-only, no weapons, as well as Alex and Ash, who are a double team in swan masks. The main one wields a chainsaw while the other can be used for long range pistol wielding. Also, there’s Mark, a dude in a bear mask who rushes down hallways with his twin machine guns to which he can point them straight ahead, or out by his sides. The Fans are the most creative in gameplay, and I’m sure any Hotline Miami 2 lovers will find themselves toying on their levels for a long time, perfecting fancy murder-moves.
By the third act we meet Manny Pardo, the detective. He’s washing his face in the bathroom of a café then exits, telling the staff behind the camera that he’s got some shit to do. He jumps into a not-deloreon and drives off somewhere. He moves like Pig-Butcher, wears no mask, and has zero dodge. I groan at the idea that I can’t just run around guns blazing and actually have to be strategic (aka pausing at the corner until a henchman meanders by and then swing a bat at his head).
There’s Jake the Snake, a big-bodied pixel who I have to ignore has a confederate flag on his couch. There’s also Evan the writer, who gets a tip from the detective to visit a gangster to interview. He gets to the place and the white suits don’t let him in, so it’s time to kill. Except this dude doesn’t want to kill. He refuses to pick up knives and will discharge all guns he moves past. He is blunt object only, although he has one panic-stricken move in which he’ll punch someone to death and beyond. I’ll also mention the Henchman, a white-suit Afro-Russian mobster with Jacket finesse and a silenced pistol. Know that there are even more characters beyond this, all of them quite distinctive in not only looks and gameplay, but their objectives, their intensity, even the mood of the game seems to fluctuate depending whose world you murder through.
Hotline 2 is noticeably harder than the original, like, my goodness. The levels are longer, the floor-plans more open, what rooms you come across are filled with windows and the addition of decorations, like floor plants and statues, often obstruct your view of any aggressing CPUs, and there will be many, many CPUs. The dogs are back and just as annoying. There are more variables of large thugs who can only be taken down by brass knuckles or guns. Oh and there will be a jail breakout mission, in which you’ll come across way too many adrenaline-hyped inmates who—I swear—phase through bullets before tackling you to the ground and pounding your head in senseless. The missions are a terrible and addictive torture. You’ll finish one with a sigh of relief only to start the next one, and realize that you’ve graduated to heightened levels of frustration. Where the hell is the pay off? The blood, duh! Somehow they’ve made the 8-bit style even more gruesome with heads rolling down the hallway and entrails bursting out of broken bodies in lovely flower patterns. Victims fall in strange crumpled positions, sometimes S-shaped as if their bones have been crushed and rearranged.
Don’t ask me to explain the plotline. It’s a hot ass mess, okay? Just enjoy the strange ‘meta’ moments like when Tony goes to save his friend’s sister and she shouts at him, “YOU JUST KILLED ALL MY FRIENDS!” And new interesting adversaries like the bronzed out muscled SWAT member, who wields two automatics while peeking around corners and doing some impressive acrobatics across the floor with Jean-Claude Van Damme swagger. Also, there will be plenty of Jacket cameos, mostly in dreams and hallucinations, harkening back to the familiar moments in the original—the surreal moments covered in zipping pixels that remind me of flies. Only now it’s Jacket asking a rendition of his now-known phrase: “Do you like hurting people?”
Play this game, guys, and play it hard. Play it loud for the soundtrack, those pulsing synth-beats that tell you shit’s about to get real. Get bright-eyed over the strangely crisp graphics in its hilariously accurate 8-bit style. Play it long for the gameplay, figure out the most stylized ways mutilate bodies—and hell, play it for the costumes. All the masks and OMG the clothes! Why is everyone so fabulously eighties? Enjoy the plethora of faces, the campy dialogue, the betrayals, and mostly enjoy pounding the controls and wailing in frustration at all the levels inundated with diverse ways to slaughter or be slaughtered.
Carol Hood holds a MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London and finished a fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Medium, Dame Magazine, Huffington Post, Business Weekly, Gawker, and more. Her novel in progress, THE MISADVENTURES OF TIP & J.B. TURNER, was nominated for the Pat Kavanagh Award for Best Manuscript, her short story, “White Alien,” was short-listed for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, and she recently won SAIC’s small grant award for her upcoming graphic novel, AMERICAN WITCH. Follow her: @CarolHenny
