The music is great, and the gameplay variety brought by multiple playable characters is nice, but everything else is inferior to the previous title. The level design, in particular, is probably the worst offender. In the first game, levels were created with fast-paced gameplay in mind, and it worked fantastically because everything was cleverly designed to reward the player for taking risks. The levels featured small rooms, allowing players to see what was ahead of them. Those with large rooms were always balanced by providing the player an idea of where the enemies were, avoiding frustration from not being able to see what killed them. It was also possible to choose your own playstyle, meaning that weapons were essentially optional outside of a few boss fights.

In this game, however, every level features huge empty spaces with enemies scattered around, and most of them have windows positioned with an enemy outside of your field of view ready to kill you. As a result, you're pretty much forced to use guns, and the pace of the game suffers severely. Lastly, the story doesn't go anywhere since Miami is nuked at the ending, killing everyone involved in the first and second game.

Hotline Miami 2 is a disappointing sequel and a huge waste of time.