Hotline Miami 2 will feature unlockable hard mode

As if it wasn't hard enough, Dennaton Games is including an unlockable harder difficulty setting in the upcoming Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. The developers have also talked about creating characters with more personality.

Dennis Wedin of Dennaton told Polygon that hard mode for each level will be unlocked once the player has earned a C+ grade or higher there. Hard mode will make enemies more difficult to take down, and it may strip you of some abilities such as being able to lock on to enemies. According to Wedin, the decision to add hard mode came from fan complaints that the first game was too easy.

"So we wanted to give them something more," said Wedin. "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."

Wedin also revealed that characters in Hotline Miami 2 will be "less blank" and better fleshed out. "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."

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number launches next year on PS4, Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux.