Hotline Miami 2 Hands-On: Wrong Number, Right Approach

By now you've probably seen the scrawled warning found on the Hotline Miami booth that delighted journalists at GamesCom. Printed on a pillar in handwriting as erratic as it was threatening, it basically warned not to ask about Drive, or why the game appears to be the same as before.It is what it is, get over it. It's fast, it's violent, it's adrenaline-injection addictive, and it's smarter than it looks at first glance. The GamesCom demo wasn't the most stable – it crashed out on me at least twice, and hitting escape reset the whole build. But it was another example of how Dennaton Games understands the notion of pacing and risk vs reward. Whereas the first game simply got you started, told you that you were a savage bastard (with some noise about your girlfriend), and told you to murder on command, here the game is framed, in the beginning at least, as a movie: Midnight Animal. After an initial level on a film set, you're then transported onto a chat show, where – after answering several banal questions – you soon hallucinate the death of everyone in the studio.