This review contains spoilers
holy fucking shit
okay so let me just get into the meat of this. the game turned from a weirdly really (from jackets perspective)senselessly violent shooter to a whole anti-war propaganda game. the game delves not just into the ethics of violent shooters, but also into the consequences of war.
you get to play as not just a few main characters, but so many of them. remember this detail because itll be important later on.
you get to see current miami, set 2 years after the original game(now in 1991) with 50 blessings still in operation. jacket is sentenced to life in prison, biker is a heavily disheveled alcoholic and living in the desert but still alive somehow, and richter was actually humanized. thats right, richter picked up 50 blessings for his dying mother. other (new) characters include a fat meatheaded confederate who signed up to 50 blessings, a writer struggling with work-life balance(and also breaking into mafia hideouts to learn more about jacket), an actor starring as jacket in a horribly misconstrued movie about the 1989 miami murders, a detective with thick skin who kills people to let off steam, a group of army veterans who idolize jacket, the son of the head of the russian mafia who has to get a grip, and his henchman. jokes aside, the game shows you so many perspectives just to rail in the fact that everyone will end up the same way; deceased. why is that, you may ask? nuclear bombs, obviously. the russian government got word of the fact that the head of their operation died and dropped multiple small bombs on miami, hawaii and presumably also some other major cities, causing everyone to die. we know this for sure because (almost) everyones deaths are shown on screen except for biker, who is presumably stumbling through the desert.
the games conclusion feels anticlimactic on purpose, and its because it tries to show you just how horrible the effects of war are. no matter how attached you get to a character, they wont get a happy ending.
and i think thats the beauty of hotline miami 2. the end still feels satisfying to me because it set out what it wanted to and dragged everything out to really drive its goal home.
okay so let me just get into the meat of this. the game turned from a weirdly really (from jackets perspective)senselessly violent shooter to a whole anti-war propaganda game. the game delves not just into the ethics of violent shooters, but also into the consequences of war.
you get to play as not just a few main characters, but so many of them. remember this detail because itll be important later on.
you get to see current miami, set 2 years after the original game(now in 1991) with 50 blessings still in operation. jacket is sentenced to life in prison, biker is a heavily disheveled alcoholic and living in the desert but still alive somehow, and richter was actually humanized. thats right, richter picked up 50 blessings for his dying mother. other (new) characters include a fat meatheaded confederate who signed up to 50 blessings, a writer struggling with work-life balance(and also breaking into mafia hideouts to learn more about jacket), an actor starring as jacket in a horribly misconstrued movie about the 1989 miami murders, a detective with thick skin who kills people to let off steam, a group of army veterans who idolize jacket, the son of the head of the russian mafia who has to get a grip, and his henchman. jokes aside, the game shows you so many perspectives just to rail in the fact that everyone will end up the same way; deceased. why is that, you may ask? nuclear bombs, obviously. the russian government got word of the fact that the head of their operation died and dropped multiple small bombs on miami, hawaii and presumably also some other major cities, causing everyone to die. we know this for sure because (almost) everyones deaths are shown on screen except for biker, who is presumably stumbling through the desert.
the games conclusion feels anticlimactic on purpose, and its because it tries to show you just how horrible the effects of war are. no matter how attached you get to a character, they wont get a happy ending.
and i think thats the beauty of hotline miami 2. the end still feels satisfying to me because it set out what it wanted to and dragged everything out to really drive its goal home.