Hotline Miami Review

Posted By Gabriel B. about 7 months, 3 weeks ago

Hotline Miami Review

Hotline Miami: Hands-On Preview, 10.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

When I first heard about Hotline Miami, I was extremely skeptical. A retro-styled action game that came out so soon after the release of Retro City Rampage? However, when I spied the game on GOG, I decided to give it a spin and was pleasantly surprised, not just in how entertaining it was but how creative it could be.

While I normally like to discuss the plot first, Hotline Miami is a different beast from other games when it comes to that aspect, so we’ll focus on its gameplay first. At its core, Hotline Miami is a mix between a top-down action game and a predatory stealth game; that is, while you’ll need to sneak around to avoid detection and survive, you need to make sure you kill everyone before leaving an area, forcing you to plan your bloody rampage out ahead of time so you eliminate as many enemies as possible before they get a chance to attack you. The gameplay handles itself rather well, aside from some strange AI issues that I’ll discuss later. At the start of each level, you’ll start at your apartment, check the answering machine for your assignment and then go to your Delorean to be transported to the building you are invading. Once you are there, you select an animal mask to wear (more on that later), and then enter the building to begin your slaughter.

GET READY TO PRESS ‘R’ A LOT.

Now, when I say slaughter, I want to make two things clear. One: this game is grotesquely violent despite the 8-bit aesthetic. Two: the game treats your violent rampage as a slaughter. Sure, there are big neon point signs as you cut down Russian gangsters and street gangs and there are big flashy moments at the end of each chapter where all your kills are tallied up and new masks and weapons are unlocked, but when you’re exiting the building after the fighting ends, the place is a virtual charnel house. Bodies don’t disappear in this game, so the end of a chapter can have you walking over piles of bloody corpses, which makes you reflect on what you did, whether it’s feeling pride in a job well done, or a sense of unease as you leave another crime scene.

Now, before you worry about this game being all doom and gloom, let me assure you that the game is fun and very addictive. The combat system is simple–left-click to attack, right-click to pick up and throw weapons, and click down on the mouse wheel to lock-on to an enemy. You can also press and hold SHIFT to look ahead on a map to spy on enemies. This set-up should be familiar to players of top-down or isometric shooter like Alien Shooter and is easy enough to pick up for new players. This is a good thing, since the game is also extremely difficult. Unlike other games in its genre, your character is extremely vulnerable and will die in one hit, forcing you to make tactical decisions on the fly.

The vulnerability is one of the things that make Hotline Miami so memorable and it makes firefights more intense and varied. For example, all levels have you start bare-handed, so, most of the time, you’ll have to find a mark to execute so you can get your first weapon. In early levels, the game will take it easy on you and even give you a weapon, but by the endgame you’ll have to quickly disarm a Mafioso, equip his gun and mow down seven of his friends after knocking down three of them by slamming the door in their faces. Then of course, you’ll have to make other split-decisions, like firing a round so you can get all of the enemies in one spot or systematically taking each enemy down by either hitting them with melee attacks or throwing your weapons to knock them out so you can make extra points by executing them. Most levels also offer you multiple ways of taking down a stage, whether you sneak out a window to sneak up behind enemies or shooting enemies through windows before they have a chance to do the same to you.

YAY! COLD-BLOODED BONUS ACHIEVED!

The enemies in the game also make things interesting, though their AI ranges from overly-competent to snipe-hunting stupid. On the plus side, enemies and their weapon layouts can change in between each attempt on a stage, with some enemies gaining guns when they used golf clubs before, for example. This leads to one of the more polarizing aspects of the enemy AI: the response to gunshots is completely random. If you fire a gun in a stage, it could be completely ignored, allowing you to pick off a group of guards without any trouble, or it can have every single enemy on the map descend on your position without any trouble. This leads to awkward situations where you can kill crowds of enemies off-screen or get blown away in a hail of bullets that you couldn’t even see coming. To be fair, this does add some replayability to levels, since you can’t depend on the same strategies to get you through, but it also shows some flaws in the game’s design. This still doesn’t hurt the gameplay since the carnage you mete out in the stages is tons of fun, but the AI is not something that is going to wow players.

Another area where the gameplay has a mixed rate of success is its animal masks. In the game, your character wears animal masks to hide his identity from cops and Russian mafia members. While your first mask has no special abilities, other masks you can unlock give you power-ups like finding more guns when you’re scrounging a stage or making your gunshots silent. This does seem like a good idea at first, but the problem is that some of the masks are terrible and even have detrimental effects, such as a mask that turns the lights off on a stage without hindering the enemies. The big problem is that, if you picked a mask that doesn’t fit the stage, you have no opportunity to change your mask unless you restart the game.

Jumping back to the boss fights, this is where the game hits its lowest point. Similar to the boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, these encounters ruin the freedom you have throughout the rest of the game, though these fights are even worse since there is literally one way to beat each boss. The bosses are also surprisingly cheap, with one boss capable of setting his entire arena on fire while other henchmen jump out from behind cover and instantly fire shotgun blasts while you desperately try to find a gun since the game robs you of any weapons you still have from the previous stage. Luckily, there are only three bosses in the game, but they are very painful to get through.

OH, WELL THANKS BUDDY, GUESS I’LL SEE YOU LATER. HUH?

Fortunately, the game has a pretty solid narrative to to keep theses bosses from ruining the experience. Hotline Miami has you taking on the role of an unnamed thug who takes jobs he receives on his answering machine from mysterious callers. However, there’s something going on with this sociopath, as he has a recurring dream about three men in animal masks who constantly judge him about his wanton violence. As his body count rises, the killer starts seeing other odd things as the masked men warn him about something that will happen to him in the future.

I’m not going to pretend to be a film connoisseur but Hotline Miami definitely has a Lynchian feel to its setting and soundtrack, in addition to some moments which reminded me of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The soundtrack, which moves between disconcerting, surreal, and amazingly catchy has moments where the tracks seem like direct send-ups to some of Lynch’s past work, like a track that sounds very similar to “Blue Frank” from season two of Twin Peaks and another which reminded me of “Walking on the Sky” from Inland Empire’s soundtrack, minus the vocals. The setting though is where the game really shines. Even when the plot is at its most straightforward, there is always an element of the surreal popping in. Whether that element is a familiar face showing up too often or the fact that, outside of a level’s building and your car, you’ll only see a flashing ground, you get the feeling that something is seriously wrong with your character’s point of view.

AS AN ASIDE, THE LIVE-ACTION TRAILER IS PRETTY GREAT.

The main character is actually one of the more interesting aspects of this game. While he has no dialogue, the game does give him a surprising amount of characterization. While it’s hard to explain how the game does this without going into spoilers territory, I’ll just say that you can tell a lot about him by how his apartment changes over the course of the game. While he is utterly reprehensible and follows the instructions of anonymous callers to the letter, occasionally even performing unnecessarily violent finishers to some of his victims, there is a sub-plot that makes his descent into violence take on an almost tragic aspect. You are certainly still playing as a cold-blooded sociopath, but there are moments where you can see him trying to be a better person, even if it’s for selfish reasons. The ending is also very fitting for the main character and, without spoiling too much, gives him and by extension, the player, exactly what he wants while also giving him what he deserves.

At least, until the epilogue, which is where my praises for the game’s narrative come to an end. While there is a new gameplay element added that provides some extra challenge, there is also a resolution that borders on cliché and confirmed my fears of what the game’s ending would be, once I heard that the game wanted people to think about violence in gaming. Don’t get me wrong, the game doesn’t patronize you for liking it or try to say that violence in gaming is bad, it’s just that the twist is one that I’ve seen done better in a score of other games (if you’ve beaten I’m OK: A Murder Simulator, you’ve seen a more humorous example of this game’s big reveal). It feels forced and lacks punch since the reveal is shown to someone who we don’t know or care about. The epilogue also hurts the surreal element of the game since it’s being played through by a character that isn’t as far gone as the main character, making elements that could have been clever artistic choices into confusing aesthetic decisions. The epilogue wasn’t enough to kill the gaming experience for me, and some players will like it, but it was enough to make me feel rather ambivalent about the ending.

At the time of this review, there have been some reported issues with the control setups. While I didn’t encounter any, the initial release did not support AZERTY keyboards (the game uses WASD for movement and didn’t have a way of compensating for a different keyboard layout) and had severe controller issues. Since then, a patch has been released which fixed the AZERTY issue, but also disabled controller support until the issues could be fixed. In my opinion, the default layout is fine and you’ll want to use a mouse for the most accurate aiming but if you’d prefer to use a controller, know that this feature is still being worked on.

WAIT, WHO ARE YOU?

Overall, Hotline Miami did what its creator set out to do. He created a hyper violent shooter that has a unique, surreal style and some fast, tense gameplay that is entertaining and disturbing. While the game definitely has its flaws, especially with its terrible boss fights and underwhelming epilogue, this shouldn’t prevent you from trying it out and enjoying it.

A copy of the game was purchased from gog.com, though it is also available on Steam and Gamersgate, and was completed in 4.5 hours. The title is a PC exclusive that is currently only available for Windows operating systems.