Hotline Miami is a top-down (your perspective is an aerial view) shooter/beat-em up from the twisted minds over at Dennaton Games studio. Originally a PC, Mac and Linux game, finding it’s true legs once it was ported over to PlayStation consoles (ps3, ps4, and psVita) by Abstraction Games. Hotline Miami follows the drug, sex (limited), and violence filled tale of a mass murderer (You), trying to find answers to cryptic phone messages, your drug induced black-outs, and just why exactly everyone wants you dead. You will either take the story for what it is, an excuse for excellently gory and brutal violence, or shrug it off as psycho babble, either way it is entertaining for what it is, just don’t take it TOO serious.
The game-play is really the heart of this game, feeling for the most part smooth and precise, leaving you completely in control at all times. The game is hard, like really really brutally hard, taking and giving real life damage to you and the enemies. If you get shot once, you’re dead. One swing of a bat to the face, you’re dead. One crow-bar, samurai sword, brick, knife, or any of the other couple dozen melee or projectile weapons come in contact with you that is lights out and back to the start of any given stage. It doesn’t feel cheap or needlessly cruel in difficulty, nor will you ever die because of the games fault, you will die hundreds upon hundreds of times because YOU are not good enough. You will die because YOU messed up, YOU didn’t shoot straight, YOU didn’t get the first swing in, YOU made too much noise, alerting your enemies, YOU died because YOU need to get better. I must say though, once you come out victorious over any given level, you will feel like a king.
There are a handful of game-play mechanics beyond shooting guns and swinging weapons. You can shove open doors at enemies, knocking them to the ground. You can use your fists to knock someone down than jump on top of them and silently beat them to death with your fists or a weapon. Weapons can be thrown to knock enemies down silently, allowing you to take them out without alerting others. Windows can be shot through or broken to hit enemies on the other side. On occasion you can climb out of windows and shimmy along the outside to avoid enemies by entering other rooms silently. The game is both simple and deep at the same time, becoming more and more addictive as the game go’s on. You can also collect or unlock different masks that you wear into each level, giving you different powers or advantages, be it a rabbit mask that lets you run faster, an owl mask that lets you discover secrets, an elephant mask that lets you take one bullet without dying, a mole mask that lets you see better in the dark, so on and so forth, adding another layer to the game. There are 22 levels to tear through, each more challenging than the last, and after each level is completed, it can be re-played to get a better score for leader-boards or collect all the hidden masks and puzzle-pieces (used to discover one last secret at the end of the game), or to unlock all the trophies the game has to offer.
The music and visual style of Hotline Miami are both top-notch, presented in a pixelated (but not quite 8-bit) format, alongside a pumping and eerie soundtrack, and taking place in the 80′s, there is a real palpable cohesive feel. For whatever reason the 80′s time period mixed with this thumping night-club soundtrack mesh perfectly with the gun-shots, screams of pain, and bloody violence the game has on display.
I loved Hotline Miami, it let me loose on rooms and rooms of cunningly sharp enemies in gory and brutal fashion, nodding my head to a killer soundtrack, enjoying a good story, and loving every second of it’s psycho and drug-addled tale of murder, violence, and intrigue. One could argue that this game encompasses everything wrong in the American youth’s minds that something so twisted and violent, so loud and crazy, so brash and so drug-induced and just so insane could be so enjoyable to me, a young college student, but it really is creative freedom at it’s best. Hotline Miami not only asks you to do horrible horrible things, but it expects you to enjoy them, become cold to splattering brains on the wall with a base-ball bat, to severing entire torsos in half with a samurai sword, to pinning someone to the wall with a dagger, or letting loose a hundred bullets on a restaurant of people, and hell if I didn’t sink hours and hours into this wonderful experience. Go out (or rather stay in because it is a download only experience) and enjoy Hotline Miami, be it on your home-console (ps3 or ps4), PC, Mac, Linux, or in your hands on the PlayStation Vita for only $9.99 (or less)
*Note: If you purchase the PlayStation version on ps3, ps4, or psvita, you own all three, a lot of bang for your buck
**Originally posted on Breakdown Review