Hotline Miami 2 gets Windows XP support

Hotline Miami 2 launched last week to critical acclaim, but a fair number of folks were disappointed to realise that the game wouldn't run on Windows XP, despite the system requirements saying otherwise prior to launch. This was unfortunate for those who pre-ordered the game.

Thankfully, there is now a fix for this via modder Silent. On the Steam forums they created an unofficial patch to this issue, which seems to have fixed the problem for many.

There are a few issues with the patch, though none of them are especially egregious. "When the game runs in DirectX 9 mode, it crashes on device lost," Silent noted. "To minimise the negative impact of this issue, the game is now forced to run in borderless windowed mode, so it still appears to be fullscreen, but cannot be minimized like regular fullscreen applications. The game will still crash when applying changes to any Graphics settings. Don't worry, despite the crash, all the changes got applied! When you launch the game again, the settings will be changed."

"To prevent those issues, it's recommended to run the game in OpenGL mode," they added.

Eurogamer contributor Tony Coles rather liked Dennaton's psychedelic sequel, even if he felt it was a step down from the original offering. "Hotline Miami 2 is definitely to be recommended," he wrote in his Hotline Miami 2 review. "It's the sequel that everyone expected, perhaps. But I'm not sure it's the sequel the original truly deserved."