Hotline Miami 2 introduces unlockable hard mode, characters with more personality

Developer Dennaton Games is planning to add an unlockable higher difficulty mode for all levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, Dennis Wedin told Polygon.

This hard mode will allow players who receive a C+ or higher on levels to unlock the respective level in hard mode. In hard mode, enemies will be more difficult to take down and some abilities may be taken away from players, such as the capacity to lock onto enemies when targeting them. Wedin said this hard mode will be added in response to feedback that the first Hotline Miami was too easy.

"In normal mode, it's pretty much the same [as Hotline Miami]," Wedin said. "We will add a hard mode to the game, like in the way Super Meat Boy works.

"We added this because some people said that the first game was too easy," he added. "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."

Hard mode hasn't been implemented into the game yet, Wedin said, so Dennaton hasn't decided what features it will include. He did note, however, that it would be "very hard."

Wedin also added that this time around, characters will be "less blank" and more fleshed out. Characters will have more personality and deeper stories, such as the film plot of the director character, in Dennaton's effort to tamper with players' 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.

"We're trying to make the world richer," he added. "We came up with all these characters when we worked on the first game, so this time around we're telling the full story of Hotline Miami. That's why it's the last one."

Hotline Miami 2 will launch on PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Windows PC, Mac and Linux next year.