Damn what a good game. Gorgeous interesting world full of amazing characters and exceptionally unique, dark, and humorous writing that keeps you engaged, even if the gameplay isn't particularly polished or novel.

Fun rougelite hack n slash. Was more fun before the Halloween update that added the witch enemies.

Despite a few holes in the story, this is overall an improvement to the first game in nearly every aspect. Loved my time with it

Charming as all hell, fun and engaging, with plenty of memorable characters and puzzles

Man this one is bad

Man I don't know with this one. The one on one fighting is incredible but, you can't help but feel like you've been cheated by the slapdash netcode every now and then, even with rollback integrated. Story mode is a joke, but tetherball and endless abyss are fun distractions for a few hrs.

Great stealth sandbox. The levels here are beautiful, intricate, and sprawling beyond anything we'd seen before. Agent 47 feels as deadly, cunning, and oddly funny here as he's ever been and its a great experience through and through, regardless of the level of handholding you accept from the game's difficulty

Weird, nothing totally clicks

Can't go wrong here, puzzles, characters, and world are all captivating despite the desolate nature of aperture labs. This is the old valve magic at full strength

Enjoyable FPS rougelite. Kind of barebones but the game mechanics and characters make for some great run variety

Probably one of the most fun, nerdiest, roguelite out there. Easy to learn but difficult to master, this game can be punishing but the charm and fast paced decision making kept me coming back till it was finished

The developers are extremely active, this game is unrecognizable from year to year, so it is difficult to speak about the gameplay here. As of 2024, the parkcour has been refined to the point of being the best in the AAA sphere in my opinion. The zombie fighting is visceral and fun, while the human combat is unwieldy and tiresome.
The story and characters, however have always been lackluster.

Good zombie killing fun bundled together with one of the most fun freeflow parkcour gameplay loops on the market. Don't come for the story or characters.

Sometimes the dice roll mechanics mess up encounters such that I feel the need to save scum. That is my only critique.
Everything else here is top notch, this is perhaps the best written game I have ever played. Nothing is as it seems and every character, every story, every little detail in the world is worth obsessing over to some degree.

Man both these games were made with the same ingredients, but for hotline two it feels like the sous chef accidentally dumped half a shaker of salt in the pot. The levels have some level of variety, yet feel more tiresome and unfair than even the most brutal from hotline 1