Hotline Miami 2 will dare to be different from its highly popular predecessor. Instead of resting on its laurels, Developer Dennaton Games has revealed to Polygon that it will be adding both a hard difficulty and multiple characters with unique storylines and personalities to the upcoming sequel.
If you’re able to make it out alive on any given level and earn a C+ or higher, the hard mode for that particular stage will be unlocked. Enemies will be much more of a handful in the higher difficulty setting, but certain abilities might also be taken away to make each and every bit of the action more tense. One developer, Dennis Wedin, pointed to the response to the original game’s difficulty when discussing why the team decided to up the ante.
“In normal mode, it's pretty much the same [as Hotline Miami].We will add a hard mode to the game, like in the way Super Meat Boy works,” Wedin explained."We added this because some people said that the first game was too easy. So we wanted to give them something more. Also, all the players trying to beat the world record or top the leaderboards — we wanted to give them more stuff to be good at."
Along with a greater challenge comes an emphasis on character personality. Instead of controlling faceless assailants without a known cause, Hotline Miami 2 will include people with actual emotions.
"We have a bunch of new playable characters and they all have their own storyline," he said. "We're trying to give them more personality so players can get to know them a bit more. In the first game you only had Jacket, and we made him pretty blank. But for this game, if we made all the characters just blank, the player would feel the same way about all of them. We want them to be different — some you will agree more with, or won't agree with, or maybe won't understand their motivations or agenda.”
Look for Hotline Miami 2 to hit PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Windows PC, Mac, and Linux next year.
