Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/18/2025)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

Developer: Dennaton

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Genre(s): Shoot 'em Up, Multidirectional Shooter

Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, PS Vita

Release Date: March 10, 2015

It’s telling how monumental Hotline Miami was in the indie circle last decade when a sequel was made a mere three years after its release. Because of their shoestring budget with a working team that could likely have fewer members than a book club, indie games very rarely receive sequels, much less in the normal development period usually taken for their triple-A peers. In the case of Dennaton’s visceral, sleazy, neon-glowing love letter to the excessiveness of the 1980s, its visionary tackling of the top-down shooter resonated strongly enough in the greater gaming zeitgeist to warrant a sequel almost immediately. While I’m sure the fans were stoked to slaughter legions of bald Russian mobsters again, I’m not thoroughly convinced that Hotline Miami was longing for another go-around. It may be unfair to state this with years of retrospection to look back on since Hotline Miami became a smash hit, but Hotline Miami is the kind of title that produces spiritual successors due to how revolutionary its gameplay was. We can use games like Katana Zero and Ruiner that aped Hotline Miami’s precision-based action formula as concrete evidence of my claim, or games such as Furi and Hyper Light Drifter that exude the same extravagant, retro aesthetic. With its impact ringing in the ears of inspired indie developers, is a sequel to Hotline Miami really necessary, especially since Jacket’s harrowing plunge down the city’s seedy underbelly was neatly wrapped in a blood-soaked bow? Considering the content in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, Dennaton wasn’t even convinced that they needed to pack in several painstaking hours of development time to produce a follow-up.

Let’s quickly recap Hotline Miami’s gameplay loop that set the indie sphere ablaze. The player is dropped into an enclosed area, mainly via a swanky vehicle that Don Johnson would likely be driving in Miami Vice, and is tasked to kill every living, breathing creature within its walls with a tactful array of melee weapons and firearms. The core stipulation at play regarding this mission is that the player cannot sustain any semblance of harm. Receiving any kind of damage will stop the player in their tracks, and they will be forced to restart the level from its entrance, or at least from the last floor they’ve cleared. The core concept of Hotline Miami’s gameplay is as solid as quartzite, and its relative simplicity lends well to player enjoyment and emulation from other indie developers. Still, no sequel should simply be content to coast entirely on its predecessor, regardless of its steadfast refinement. The obligatory quality-of-life improvements that Hotline Miami 2 adds to the first game’s fine formula are minimal, but are nonetheless appreciated. Firstly, whenever the player is brandishing a gun, an icon in the bottom left corner now indicates the type of ammunition they’re currently using. It may already seem obvious to the player which type of gun they are using, but in an environment where lightning-fast reactions are key to survival, the player cannot waste even a second wondering what their current ammunition consists of through guesswork. In instances where the player stalls ever-so-slightly in these tense situations, the blowback they are likely to receive from an enemy is not always guaranteed to be fatal. If the player is nicked by a pistol bullet in Hotline Miami 2, there seems to be a chance that they’ll be able to continue their murderous rampage relatively unscathed. They’ll spurt a pint of blood onto the floor, but not enough to render them unconscious, apparently. One might play through the game to its entirety and never even notice these alterations, but it’s nice to know that the developers put even a modicum of consideration into improving their product, as minuscule as it might have been.

Given the minor changes made to Hotline Miami’s formula in this sequel, one might assume that it's a modest rehash of its predecessor that could’ve arguably been better suited as glorified DLC. In regard to every other aspect of Hotline Miami 2, the developers have stretched the parameters of the series to its breaking point. In a literal sense of this statement, the levels in Hotline Miami 2 are far more spacious than those of the first game. The game is mostly set in the foreground of Florida’s southernmost major metropolitan area, but the enemies have evidently picked less dingy, back-alley architectures to establish a stronghold. I’m no architect, but I can discern an expansion in cubic diameter compared to the relatively confined spaces that comprised the previous game’s levels. Some levels in Hotline Miami 2 even divert away from the Sunshine State all the way to the middle of the Pacific in Hawaii. I’ll divulge the context behind this chronic shift in setting soon, but for now, I’d like to use these new, sprawling types of environments to illustrate the fundamental issue in expanding the space of a Hotline Miami level.

Using the Hawaii levels as an example, the lack of defined walls in these outdoor settings greatly increases the rate of vulnerability, positions that are especially worrisome in a game that harshly penalizes the player for any amount of damage they receive. Lest we forget that the enemies in Hotline Miami are hopped up on speed, which gives their fire rate deadeye precision. Even in the enclosed areas set in buildings, the settings are so expansive that they’ll still have to acclimate to dealing with a bevy of blind spots around every corner. I was dusted by the spray of a shotgun blast from an enemy that I couldn’t conceivably catch from my viewpoint too many times to count, and it pissed me off royally. One could argue that all the player needs to do is learn the layout of every enemy’s trajectory and snipe them swiftly with this information, but enemy placement seems to be an inconsistent variable. Not to mention, every inch of each level is crawling with enemies like spiderlings hatched from an egg, so every angle of the level is a possible point of being executed in a flash. On top of obscuring a vital amount of the player’s view needed to detect enemy movement, Hotline Miami 2 adds plenty of level gimmicks that muddle their line of sight to a greater extent in the name of diversifying the series' formula. By far, the level “Seizure” suffers the most from this initiative. The dimly lit aura of a nightclub may be appropriate for the decadent sleaze Hotline Miami exudes, but this type of environment is anything but practical as a level. Maybe I would’ve eaten more carrots over the course of my life if I knew I’d be struggling immensely trying to acclimate to Hotline Miami 2’s misdirection. Trial and error was a relevant gameplay factor in the first game, but the guesswork involved with the sequel’s levels makes the majority of them unnecessarily demanding.

The developers also seem to subscribe to my statement that Hotline Miami is a game that should ideally generate copycats because that’s the conceit that drives the sequel’s narrative. Jacket has become an urban legend since his solo adventure down the rabbit hole of a Miami mafia conspiracy, and his actions have resonated strongly with several of the city’s citizens. A director has been tasked to dramatize the events of the first game through his film titled “Midnight Animal,” using a slovenly man in a pig mask to play Jacket. Putting a cherry on top of the ultraviolence in this film is a good ol’ fashioned rape scene, the most scandalous talking point on the sequel’s graphic content and something I’m almost certain Jacket did not commit. Whether or not the heinousness here is fabricated for shock value on the director’s part, its inclusion is intended to highlight how the severity of these actions is lifted once it’s revealed to be an artistic display in the realm of fiction. However, the veil of celluloid fantasy is blurred when Jacket’s actor, Martin Brown, starts expressing serious intent for real violence, which results in getting him gunned down on set by the film’s lead actress as an act of self-defense. Jacket’s impact doesn’t stop there, as the sequel also dedicates a considerable chunk of screen time to four friends who espouse Jacket’s radical methods. When they all attempt to execute a mission of political upheaval as Jacket did, let’s just say that their results are unfavorable compared to their inspiration. Manny Pardo brandishes the respectable badge of the Miami police force, but he’s eventually revealed to be a notorious serial killer who stalks the city streets. We now get to experience the downfall of the super jingoistic Jake, who was briefly mentioned in the first game. We also see the trials and tribulations of the red long-haired man, who goes by many aliases, as he storms the Pacific front of Hawaii earlier in the 1980s. Between all of the fresh-faced psychotics and fleshing out the stories of supporting characters, there’s an investigative journalist named Evan Wright attempting to make sense of Jacket’s criminal past and the mimicked occurrences of late. Me too, dude.

Hopping to and fro from protagonist to protagonist may diminish any impact of their story arcs, but each character essentially provides the consistent standard of Hotline Miami’s gameplay. Some exceptions where the player is given the same choice of specializing in a quirk that’s granted by a mask depend on the characters, such as the distinctive attributes of the four “fans.” However, the game still tends to forgo the freedom of choice in many instances. Namely, when the player is forced to alternate between the four friends in their climactic level of “Death Wish,” an epic endurance test of a level divided into four sections, where each participant gets their time to shine. Each portion of this level is daunting in its own right, and imagine how excruciating some of the sections are when the player sticks to the specialties of one mask as they would in the first game. This level and “Seizure” are on my Hotline Miami shitlist for imposing the steepest stipulations across all Hotline Miami chapters.

Before anyone attempts to wrap their heads around this jumbled mess of a narrative and streamline it to a point of cohesion, I advise approaching the “story” of Hotline Miami 2 from a different perspective. Linearity and conciseness are evidently not relevant factors to Hotline Miami 2, given how the game teleports from character to character without letting their individual arc breathe for a second. My summation is that Hotline Miami 2’s narrative is not intended as a typical story, but as an essay with each character’s arc as an argumentative body paragraph with a thesis that connects them all. The thesis in question relates to the subject of violence, specifically, violence in the media, and how it can leave a lasting impression on the audience that consumes it. The four “fans” who emulate Jacket’s actions right down to storming the base of the Russian mafia are a given, but I don’t think the developers are suggesting that Miami, or the whole world, was a halcyon utopia before Jacket corrupted it by blowing the brains out of an incalculable number of Russians. “Beard” was putting lethal holes into Russians way out in the Pacific four whole years before the thought of doing so ever crossed Jacket’s mind, and Jake was a contemporary of Jacket’s whose anti-communist fervor ignited a bloodbath whose onus fell completely on him and him alone. The rogue cop, Manny Pardo, can’t resist abusing his badge and creating carnage, and Martin Brown’s lack of capacity to understand the difference between fictional violence and the real thing is disturbing. With these characters, Hotline Miami 2 seems to suggest that humans crave violence and hold a disposition to enact terrible instances of it on the slightest whim. It’s the most primal unit of our ID that we cannot suppress, no matter how base and undignifying it may be. However, some may argue the productivity of that violence depending on the character, for one could justify the intent of someone like Jacket or Beard, whereas there is no excuse for someone like Manny or Martin. Still, at the end of the day, violence is a disgusting mistress no matter its impetus. Solving the crisis of having several unhinged reprobates by disposing of them with a nuclear blast may be a bit dramatic for my tastes, but I suppose it complements the apocalyptic undertones woven in the fabric of Hotline Miami.

As par for the course regarding any sequel, Hotline Miami 2 is bigger than its predecessors, but unfortunately, in all of the wrong ways (no pun intended). The sequel proves that it’s difficult to augment the game’s tried and true formula significantly and produce a product of higher quality as a result, so the developers compensated for a dearth of mechanical inspiration by expanding some of the facets that should’ve been left alone. Widening the parameters of each level and adding arbitrary conditions does not result in a more engaging experience, nor does broadening the story's scope to incomprehensible heights equate to genius narrative building. All it amounts to is frustration, and not the organic kind that marked the first game’s success. Still, despite Dennaton’s efforts to bloat the series like Violet Beauregarde, the fact that they couldn't adulterate Hotline Miami’s foundation too drastically means that the game still retains the addictive essence of the first game, just with a few additional pounds attached. Besides, pretension in a medium generally perceived as a pedestrian time-waster inherently elevates its artistic potential, even if it's unsavory. As long as there is still a game to be played, all instances of auteurism are acceptable, and Hotline Miami 2 skates on this line by the skin of its teeth.

Hotline Miami Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 2/11/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Hotline Miami

Developer: Dennaton Games

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Genre(s): Shoot 'em Up, Multi-directional Shooter

Platforms: PC, PS3, PS Vita

Release Date: October 23, 2012

Why was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive such an influential cultural force across all forms of art and entertainment last decade? The film was released in the early period of the decade in 2011, so there was plenty of time for its 1980s-reminiscent aesthetic to seep into the zeitgeist of the 2010s. However, what I’m wondering is why so many artists gravitated towards emulating Drive’s style. Admittedly, the elements that constitute its style are endearingly kitsch, and the way that the retro-chic artistic direction is layered over gritty, darkened overtones presents a unique contrast that surprisingly melds together superbly. Normally, highlighting the purplish pink neon hue of the 1980s is a signifier of the decade’s elated decadence, but Drive’s direction rather exposes the drug-addled dirt and sleaze underneath the surface. Its modus operandi wasn’t an homage to the next-to-last decade of the 20th century, but a scathing depiction of what was hidden in plain sight across the ten years. Drive resonated with the influx of vaporwave and hypnagogic pop artists whose music reckoned back to the antiquated production of 1980s synthpop, as well as films like Baby Driver and the long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049 that shared Drive’s signature aesthetic and brooding, yet high-octane action pacing. In the realm of video games, the closest another work of fiction ever came to truly capturing Drive’s aura to its full extent is Hotline Miami, an indie darling that effectively translated all of the components of Refn’s most notable film to an interactive medium. However, while Hotline Miami may seem like an interactive Drive homage on the surface, the game achieves something beyond an interactive tribute.

To start, Hotline Miami is fucking putrid. Drive, of course, had its fair share of scenes that didn’t shy away from depicting graphic, stylized violence on the celluloid, but every waking moment of Hotline Miami is a torrent of blood splatter. The entirety of Hotline Miami is that elevator scene from Drive and plenty of fans of the film state they find that scene hard to stomach due to its unflinching brutality. I realize that Hotline Miami is not a literal video game adaptation of Drive but if anyone were to make the argument that the violence of any adapted work is heightened in the video game medium to gamify the content, Hotline Miami would be a testament to this claim. “Jacket,” the anonymous protagonist whose nickname stems from the same snazzy clothing item signifier that Ryan Gosling’s character from Drive possesses, paints the interior walls of Miami’s corporate buildings with the gushing, red bodily plasma of the Russian mafia. However, the game never romanticizes the carnage, depicting the frequent massacres that occur throughout the game with a dread-filled, dark tone that becomes apparent once the flies start buzzing around the fresh, stinking corpses in Jacket’s wake once he climbs back up to his vehicle. The vibrant 1980s backdrop and aesthetic choices are practically what save Hotline Miami from plunging into severely horrific territory because what is being presented is truly grim and vile. I’m astonished how Hotline Miami didn’t draw in a flood of lashback from the typical crowd of concerned parents and scapegoating politicians considering the breadth of its depravity. Really, it’s probably because the pixel art that renders the viscera looks so quaint that Hotline Miami’s graphic content doesn’t bat an eye in an era with gaming visuals that could be mistaken for cinematics. Still, IF Hotline Miami weren’t an indie title where the developers were working with the bare essentials of gaming presentation, the game would make Max Payne look like Kirby. Hell, it could maybe even surpass Manhunt’s level of nihilistic gore.

Even though I’ve already compared Hotline Miami to Drive ad Nauseam at this point, the general objective across each of the game’s levels is reminiscent of the climactic sequence of Taxi Driver. For each of Hotline Miami’s chapters, Jacket enters one of the southern tip of Florida’s various commercial buildings, whose location is given through a dossier transferred to him via a phone call. Like Travis Bickle in Sport’s New York brothel, his objective is to clear the building of everyone in it, and I don’t mean by executing a devious prank like pulling the fire alarm. Jacket must take no prisoners and murder everyone on sight. The player witnesses this mission from a top-down perspective, a view of the scene from an impersonal angle as if they are an accomplice to the carnage as opposed to acting as the prime perpetrator (or an homage to when the screen pans out at the end of Taxi Driver?) More than likely, the top-down mechanics are to complement the twin-stick shooter gameplay. The player will control Jacket’s movement with a close combination of keyboard keys while performing most of the actions by alternating the left and right buttons on the mousepad. For anyone playing the console ports of Hotline Miami, both analog sticks need to be used simultaneously for both Jacket’s movement and aiming controls. Jacket enters every building unarmed, but this surprisingly isn’t a horribly miscalculated judgment call on his part as the area is littered with guns and other blunt objects galore. Simply knock out a goon situated at the front of the building and steal his weapon and he’s good to go. Of course, Jacket will dispose of his first victim a little more thoroughly, so the game allows him to perform an “execution” move on the ground with whichever weapon he has or his bare hands to slip the unconscious foe into a state of eternal oblivion. Once Jacket makes a meticulous effort to search every corner, closet, and behind every potted plant to dispatch all of his targets, he retraces his steps back up to the Delorean-esque limousine back to his safe house.

The rinse-and-repeat kind of gameplay that Hotline Miami bestows should tire the player through the stacked number of levels the game provides. However, Hotline Miami’s strict, constant difficulty curve is what staves off the repetition from becoming grating. Hotline Miami’s main gimmick is that the player must mow down the army of Russian mobsters without sustaining even a smidge of damage. If Jacket so much as trips on a cockroach that is sure to scurry by in these scuzzy hallways, he’s completely done for. Not to mention, all of the enemies inside are acutely alert (probably due to copious cocaine consumption), and they’ll spring at the opportunity to beat Jacket down or shoot him on sight before he can register what just happened. Hotline Miami’s core idiosyncrasy is absolutely brilliant, as the swift penalty for one’s mistakes adds a plethora of rich layers to the gameplay. While the overarching goal is to expunge the area of any Russian mafia activity, succeeding is not a simple matter of readying, aiming, and firing at will. Hotline Miami is a quasi-stealth game in that the player must refrain from acting rashly and plan each step accordingly. The jig won’t be up if an enemy catches Jacket, but the player should ideally be treating the overwhelming odds at hand with patience and tact if they want to make a clean getaway. However, for as proficient as some players might be in the vein of traditional stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Hotline Miami practically guarantees that they’ll never achieve victory on their first attempt. Hotline Miami is a game whose progression is marked by trial and error, memorizing every little increment of the field and the relative rotation of where the enemies are stationed or the trajectory of their pacing. Later levels also add vicious rottweiler dogs that pin down Jacket and tear his trachea right out of his throat as well as burly black bouncers who are immune to melee weapons to thwart any accumulative familiarity. However, the cardinal rules to abide by in Hotline Miami, such as that the abrasively loud gunshots will always attract attention and that not taking advantage of every abrupt door swing to subdue enemies, will always be in place to ensure a quicker victory. As the game progresses, Jacket will unlock a wide variety of crude animal masks with special attributes that could compensate for whichever blindspot keeps befalling them. A checkpoint will be placed once the player reaches another floor as well, so the game is more than accommodating to its regulations. Still, some may feel dejected constantly respawning at the entrance upon subsequent failures, but the eventual triumph over the league of bald, eastern European Don Johnson wannabes will invigorate the player with a sense of gratification. Plus, all of the failed attempts behind the success will fuel one impressively smooth go-around. Jacket will execute every last living, breathing being in the vicinity unscathed like Travis Bickle, but if Travis Bickle had the killing acuity of a ninja.

Hotline Miami’s substance is interwoven into the gameplay and presentation, but there is a subtly told story that is still being told between the levels. Since his girlfriend left him, Jacket’s life has plummeted into a downward spiral of personal atrophy. The negligent, destitute state of his apartment is emblematic of Jacket’s metaphorical inner soul and mental state. Jacket’s evident apathy for his life and the world around him has made him a prime candidate for a radical group referred to as the “Fifty Blessings,” whose mission to fracture America’s relationship with Russia by exterminating their mafia is a very Cold War-centric pursuit of nationalism. Only a reprobate with nothing to lose would sign themselves up for a dangerously self-destructive act, and Jacket undoubtedly fits the description. As he accustomed himself to the daily grind of mass murder, Jacket’s mental state deteriorates even further. Three men often visit him in a hazy, darkened stupor of crawling insects that are wearing the animal masks he uses on the job, his “three witches” who judge him on his actions instead of offering premonitions. Jacket’s mental fortitude seems like it could bounce back after igniting a new relationship with a new girl he saved from a sleazy executive producer during a mission and interacting with a friendly and seemingly omnipresent store clerk that charitably gives him a bevy of free shit for his troubles. Unfortunately, the clerk winds up dead and so does his prospective new love, and the killer of the latter minor character shoots Jacket. He survives and is taken to the hospital, which is where we discover that the events in the game leading up to Jacket’s recovery have been a comatose recollection of his life’s recent events. Once he escapes the hospital and infiltrates the Miami police station, he confronts the man who reduced him to a vegetable and decides to let him live (in the canonical timeline) to procure instead information on where to locate the Russian mafia’s district leader. He confronts the local don, plus his female and canine bodyguards to shield him during his boss encounter, and then kills himself because he’s a man of outstanding pride. Jacket has rid late 1980s Miami of the Russian scourge, and treats himself to a long toke off of a Marlboro red as he tosses a picture from his pocket off the balcony.

Sure, this is technically the current of events that occurs throughout Hotline Miami’s runtime. However, how the game presents its story is akin to a photo collage where the pictures are aligned in a row. The player still has to piece together the context and correlative bearings between scenes and even then, the glue holding these hazy frames together isn’t sticking and making the pictures slip. In fact, we aren’t even privy to who is behind the phone messages until “Biker,” a boss battle whose death was only a fabrication in Jacket’s fleeting consciousness, confronts the two men responsible in the game’s epilogue. This is why Hotline Miami’s greatest theme is dissociation, a prevalent topic among the morally questionable protagonists from the films that comprise the game’s major influences. While Jacket is yet another unhinged renegade bound to enact (several) killing sprees, how Hotline Miami takes advantage of the video game medium to present Jacket’s dissociation from reality is utterly genius. You see, video games can get away with having a fractured, surreal narrative because at least it’s supported by the gameplay elements to hold the foundation. In most character-driven films, the entire plot arc has to be linear and cogent to prevent it from collapsing. All the player has to understand from the gameplay is that Jacket is climbing up the proverbial ladder to reach the tip of the Russian mafia tower, and the ascent is going to become more hectic the higher they reach. The lack of context and frazzled construction of the plot makes the player as dissociated with reality as Jacket, a deeper, symbiotic connection with the character than simply engaging with them from afar as a viewer. Jacket’s motives for assigning himself the onus of assassinating the entire Russian mafia are unclear but then again, what is the player’s motives for directing him through all the blood he spills in the first place? Dissociation isn’t a one-way street for the protagonist for the cogent viewer to assess from a clearer perspective; they are as confused and mentally incongruous as Jacket is, equally dissociating from the damnable ethics of the heinous sprawl of bloodshed.

If Drive was the first stepping stone in establishing the “synthwave” aesthetic that was popular in the 2010s, Hotline Miami most likely launched it into primetime. It’s no wonder as to why it resonated with so many gamers considering the extent of how inspired the game feels. Hotline Miami’s influences are conspicuous, but it is anything but pastiche. Hotline Miami borrows the similar themes, characters, and grizzly tone found in films like Drive and Taxi Driver and re-blends them into the realm of gaming like a fine cocktail on ice. It understood that it could accomplish what those films feasibly couldn’t in another medium, with exceptionally engaging and unique mechanics that future indie developers will be emulating from now until the end of time. If Hotline Miami’s goal was to create an interactive Drive, the developers managed to supersede its initial source. If one doesn’t mind reaching down into the depths of depravity and enacting ambiguous acts of ultraviolence, Hotline Miami is a landmark for gameplay and narrative innovation for gaming.