Believing that a sequel isn't always necessary, Hax Monsters gives his view on why we could of done without Hotline Miami 2
Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: Guest, Review, Video games
I’ll
cut to the chase right away: the Hotline Miami series has, for me,
set the record for the quickest and most extreme drop in quality
ever, a record which was previously held by the Payday series.
Hotline Miami’s fall is even more jarring, considering that the
first game was a work of art with tight design, near-perfect gameplay
and an actual message, while its sequel to me is more like an
incoherent mess that only seems to exist because of that a sequel had
to be squeezed out one way or another. I should mention that I
understand why the game has received such widespread positive
reactions, but I just want to focus on less commonly heard part of
the game, which are the things that are wrong with it.
In
case Hotline Miami has slipped you by, which is only possible if
you’ve closed your eyes to the entire indie circuit for years, let
me give you a brief recap. The game was a top-down fighting game
about committing massacres in 1980’s Miami, solely because of that
you were told to do so over the phone. It’s strength was that it
made you enjoy doing horrible things to your fellow man by forcing
you to do the killing at such speed that you couldn’t think about
the horribleness of your actions. Then, when you’d cleared out the
building of all life, you had to walk back through the place past all
the corpses, blood and smashed skulls. That way, the sheer brutality
of it all hit you all the more, since you were not able to think
about that while you were on your killing spree. In between the murder
parades, you observe yourself lose grip on reality as the massacres
and Miami as you knew it become inseparable. Few games ever could
make me feel that bad about myself.
It
is important to know what made the original great to see why the
sequel should, in my mind, never have existed. The first reason would
be the complete absence of a properly delivered message. Hotline 1’s
message was perfectly caught in its most famous quote: ‘Do you like
hurting people?’.
Well Do you?
A compelling question, as in that game we were
just a normal person doing horrible things for no other reason than
that a message on our answering machine told us to do so. ‘Fun’
was the only reason to kill because of that it was our reason to play
the game. Hotline Miami 2 sometimes pretends to have the same
message. For instance, you still walk past all the remnants of your
targets after a level, but now this is no longer impressive, firstly
because of that the game’s story now gives you an actual reason for
the killing ( you were a soldier that had to capture a building, a
criminal that had to assassinate a few people or, I kid you not, a
writer that wants information for his book ). As we now had a reason
to do what we did, it feels as if our hands are clean. We feel no
guilt.
The second reason for the absence of guilt is that Hotline
Miami 2 is a way too flabby long game and the gruesome sight of a
bloodbath loses something if you see it for thirty times. And
although the sequel’s story does not fit with it, HM2 even on one
occasion has to explicitly state the point of the story in dialog. In
this dialog, one character says: ‘we do horrible things, and deep
down we like it’. This came across as very misplaced, because of
that the games message is no longer impressive, for the
aforementioned reasons. What’s also worse than before is that they
now wrap the message in a quote that is no longer a question worth
contemplating, but a simple statement. Therefore, all introspective
is lost.
You will be seeing this a lot.
As
far as the story is concerned, I can be pretty brief. It’s biggest
problem is the lack of ambiguity, because of that this makes it
impossible to properly spread the game’s message: “we do horrible
things and enjoy it’’. Where Hotline: Miami was mysterious, and
compelling, providing next to no exposition, Wrong Number explains
everything and gives every character a set of traits and motivations.
This normally would be a good thing, but if your story is so
disconnected from everyday reality as here, and if your message is
that your murdering has no reason, then the last thing you want to do
is make the characters people from everyday reality who actually have
reasons to kill. This game has multiple characters, each with their
own little story line that barely has anything to do with the other’s
storylines. After every mission you switch to another character,
which makes it impossible to actually get engaged with any of the
stories. And then there is the ending, which is horrible because of
that it comes out of nowhere and had no relationship with anything
that happened during the game.
The cover is even a spoiler if you can figure out what is happening.
Before
launch I had already guessed that I’d dislike Hotline Miami 2’s
story. I was right about that, but what I didn’t see coming was how
horrible the gameplay turned out to be. To me it seems as if the
developers forgot everything that Hotline Miami 1 was about
gameplay-wise. The essence of the original was killing many enemies
at insane speed without needing planning, but managing to survive by
acting quickly based on your intuition. One mistake left you dead.
This essence does not fit HM2’s levels, which are often filled with
special enemies that take so long to kill that you might as plan in a
thirty-minute appointment with them to end their lives.
That's my 2 o'clock appointment, who is next?
On many
occasions you will die because of ten assault rifle-wielding
nutters that came at you while you were still slowly squishing another
guy’s eyes out. Those assault rifles are another problem, by the
way. Do you know what does not work in a game where you get killed by
merely two bullets? Enormous rooms full of gun-equipped foes that
accurately shoot you in a quarter of a second while they stay way
out of melee range.
You can only get rid of these guys by standing at
a corner and popping out briefly to shoot them one by one as they
charge at you. This amounts to cover-based shooting and there are
enough games that do that already.
Also, like Hotline Miami 1, Wrong
Number is a top-down game. This is extremely frustrating because of
that there are so many big rooms that you can’t look all the way
through and often these are filled with the aforementioned
assault-rifle dudes. Here you can’t even do the peek-out-and-shoot
thing because you can’t see the enemy. You also can’t go out and
look for him because of that they’ll always see you first as your
camera barely shows you anything and you can’t move your camera
properly while moving. These situations where you can’t see your
enemy come up all the time and can be resolved in two ways.
One: You
find a gun and spray into the distance, hoping you’ll hit anything.
Two: you stand out of cover just long enough for the enemy to see you
to lure them into your cover so you can melee them. Not only does
this feel like prostituting yourself, it also breaks all the game’s
flow.
Silverain: I think you mean been bait here Hax unless you've have some strange encounters with those in the escort business.
Furthermore,
the title was still too broken to play right after launch. Often
enemies would endlessly bounce back and forth between two doorposts
and often they, even after many patches, won’t see through open
doors. Sometimes it is even possible to leave the playable area of
the map by going left or right before you entered the map. You can
even lure enemies out with you and none of that is supposed to
happen. And like in the previous game, the AI reacts very
inconsistently. In Hotline Miami 1 this was a good thing because of
that this uncertain factor made improvisations and quick reactions a
necessity. In Hotline Miami 2 however, the levels are all built in
such a way that you can only get through them with repetitive
trial-and-error gameplay and exactly that does not fit with AI that
acts differently when it is not in a good mood.
Example of the door bug.
Another
part of the original that for me was ruined was the soundtrack. Where
Hotline Miami had a calm and subtle soundtrack that not only fit the
setting but also underlined the intensity of the massacres by
juxtaposing it, Wrong Number tried to improve the music following the
same philosophy that dictates that you can improve a hamburger by
only adding more meat. The clips are now so full of noises that it
sounds as if your speakers are busted and the entire change feels
like a useless effort to try and raise the stakes. It is as if a
storyteller wants to make his story better by yelling it at the top
of his voice.
Silverain: I think this one is down to taste I think that there are a few songs I'd mix and match between the two titles rather than call either of them superior judge for yourself below:
One
more personal niggle that I’d like to mention is not exactly a
complaint but mostly an undesirable marketing tactic which Dennaton
have most likely adopted because of that Grand Theft Auto V made a
lot of money following the same tactic. Wrong Number supposedly comes
with a level editor, but that is not released until many months after
the release of the actual game.
Silverain: Wait there's a level editor? That was released so late I didn't even hear about it.
Firstly, I find this unacceptable
because of that the people who bought this game paid for the full
thing and therefore should get the full thing on release. Secondly,
this pre-emptively blocks any and all criticism towards the game
runtime or level building, because of that now any fanboy of the game
can thwart all complaints in this department by saying that the
community will add a lot of good content soon. After all, a level
editor theoretically means that you get an infinite supply of levels.
However, I don’t expect things to work out this way.
After all,
because of that the level editor comes out so late, the vast majority
of the people will already be done with Hotline Miami 2. They will
have moved on to infinitely better games and won’t come back to the
level editor. Not only does this mean that those people effectively
paid for more content than they actually used, it also means that
there will not be as much new content as one might expect because of
that the fans of the first hour will have moved on.
Silverain: Thankfully there is a collection of levels available over on Reddit sub hotlinemiamimaps for those of you looking.
Should you ask
me, then the main game’s launch should have been pushed back to the
date at which the level editor is currently due. I would have been
happy to wait a bit, because of that one proper launch is way better
than two rushed-out ones. The extra waiting time would also have
given the devs the needed time to take care of all those remaining
bugs.
I
know that it is unfair to completely rub a game’s head over a belt
sander just because of that it was not classic material like it’s
predecessor, but don’t get me wrong. Had I not known about Hotline
Miami 1, then I would still dislike Wrong Number. Less so, but still.
Disregarding HM1 Wrong Number feels like a very schizophrenic game.
It doesn’t seem to know what it wants. The entire game’s core
mechanic, the combat, is built around high-speed melee-based combat,
but many enemies take ages to kill or have guns. The game is top-down
but demands that you see dangers that lie far beyond your vision. The
killing is accompanied by more blood than a medieval battlefield, but
suddenly, in the missions with the aforementioned writer character,
you can only knock people out and guns fall apart the moment you grab
them.
Been able to do this is awesome though.
In normal levels you constantly have to switch weapons out in
accordance with the situation, and you can’t reload, but in some
levels, with the soldier character, you suddenly can only use one set
gun and a knife. You also suddenly have to reload your gun and find
ammo for it. In every level you play alone, but in some levels you
play as a ‘character’ that consists of two people.
The Swan twins arguably the toughest characters to play.
In these parts
you directly control one guy that melees when you press the melee
button, while another guy follows you closely and shoots when you
press the ‘throw weapons’ button. This system often doesn’t
work because of that the two are not in the exact same position.
Therefore, on many occasions, you will shoot someone because of that
he is in range of the melee character you directly control, only to
see your gun character shoot into a wall, attracting every goon in
the state of Florida to you exact position.
In
summary, I think Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number should not have
existed. It brings little good and seems to do everything in it’s
power to retroactively ruin it’s predecessors. I am not exactly
blaming the developers for making a sequel, because of that so many
fans asked for it. If my guesses are correct, most fans were
satisfied with this game. That’s great, of course, but I myself am
left with a bit of an empty feeling, because of that sometimes
sequels do more harm than good. Enough is enough and more is not
always better.