Previews

Hands-on with Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number for PS Vita

Ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence

Hands-on with Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number for PS Vita

The Silver Award-winning Hotline Miami for PS Vita was a fast-paced, top-down '80s-infused psychedelic arcade action game crying out for a longer campaign. Fortunately, the story continues in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number.

Two scenes were fully playable for the Rezzed 2014 demo. The first scene, "Down Under," opened with a party of four Fans - masked vigilantes out to get noticed by the media in hopes of receiving calls from the group that reached out to Jacket in the original.


The Fans' headquarters appears to be a bar of some kind

After a short discussion the crew - wearing swan, zebra, bear, and tiger masks - decide it's time to go out and cause a bit of a ruckus, and so the demo begins.

Only the Corey (the zebra mask) and Tony (the tiger mask) were playable, with Corey being "agile and flexible" whilst Tony can kill with one punch at the expense of the ability to wield melee weapons and firearms.

The game looks and plays as well as it ever did, with no noticeable additions at all and the previously announced Hard mode nowhere to be seen (if it ain't broke...)

Foolhardily bulling your way through each level still remains a perfectly acceptable way of figuring out the best route and stacking death combos for bonus points.

Thugs are as thick as they are unpredictable, knocking themselves out by walking through doors and mindlessly running towards the sound of gunshot while you hug the nearest corner and punch them as they approach.


Firearms remain a risky proposition with slightly fiddly targeting

The knife is as insanely overpowered as ever, allowing you to slice and dice opponents whether you walk into them backwards, sideways or head-on as long as you reach them before they blow you away with a shotgun.

Not that you even need the knife. Perhaps worryingly, it was possible to kill enemies through walls in this build of the game. While the inherent bugginess of Hotline Miami was part of its gritty charm, something like this makes the sequel game-breakingly easy for hardened veterans of the original

One of the most acclaimed aspects of the original was its soundtrack, so I'm glad to report that Wrong Number is on-track with two slick synth tracks in the shape of "Sexualizer" and "Miami Disco" from Perturbator.

The second scene, "Execution," opens with a chat show promoting a slasher flick inspired by the events of Hotline Miami - "Midnight Animal."

The director tells the host, "I have wanted to kill kids, strangle them; beat people's heads in, rip their eyes out, just listen to them scream, see them die in agony. I finally get to do that now."

Suddenly, everyone around the director appears to have been murdered and mutilated. The director appears as the protagonist of his film, The Pig Butcher, in a bearded pig mask. Richard, the rooster mask-wearing character who visited Jacket in similar circumstances in the first game, appears under a spotlight.


Door mastery is one of the keys to a successful run

The sexual violence in last year's demo was much reported. This year's demo instead focuses on the out-and-out violence of the first game, with shades of the 2011 crime thriller Drive.

The demo ends with The Fans surrounding a man named Brando and mashing him to a pulp with an assortment of melee tools. "Something strange is going on," he says. "I want to go to the jungle... I just want to go home." And with that, his head is smashed in.

For better or worse, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is shaping up to be more of the same. But that's all fans of the original ever really wanted. A new trailer will be out this week, teasing the full game's release on PS Vita slated for autumn 2014.

Danny Russell
Danny Russell
After spending years in Japan collecting game developers' business cards, Danny has returned to the UK to breed Pokemon. He spends his time championing elusive region-exclusive games while shaking his fist at the whole region-locking thing.