Hotline Miami

Summary: The game itself is worth 10€ but suffers from technical issues which one has to swallow. I could not play the Update Version due to these tech issues. The Good: The Actual Game This game does a lot right. Especially the challenge is well‐made. Dying a lot is part of the game, but one always has the feeling that one could have made it if one would have just played a little better. The levels are not only of fair design, every few you also get to play one surprises you with a completely new approach, so that you won't find yourself falling into any routine. High Scores unlocking new skills and items to be collected provide a nice final incentive to replay a level or at least get the last out of it. The atmosphere in the game is source of its fame and rightly so. The music is engaging and sets a good mood for both the story and the gameplay. It is in the foreground but never gets on your nerves. The story is minimalistically told but comes together nicely in the end., befitting the simple but good gameplay. Only two detractors are in the game proper: One is the circumstance that bullets skip a short distance before they become damaging. Whether this is a wrong design decision or a bug, I cannot tell. The other is the decision to dialogue occur after the reset point so you will find yourself dying a few times because you accidentally fired a shot while clicking some text away for the twentieth time. These two flaws are far from deal‐breakers, though. The Bad: Tech issues The game's Original Version comes ready‐to‐play, the Update requires several DLLs/installations, which can partially be found on GOG. But even then it does not run with certainty and I soon found my willingness to do research to get a paid game running exceeded. Further, the game crashes sometimes, though not often enough to be a dealbreaker for me. What hurts most is that sometimes clicking your mouse will not trigger ANY reaction from your character. Also frustrating, but not dealbreaking.

I remember playing through this game a couple of years ago, and back then I found it frustrating at times. Now I was able to blast through it in one sitting. The length of the game depends on one's skill. The soundtrack is pretty much perfect. It seems that my biggest problems with this game weren't as severe as I remember them being back in the day, and I'm going to list them here: - RNG (biggest problem of this game, even speedrunners need luck at certain points in the game, as certain starting configurations are near impossible, and it's impossible to pull off certain stats consistently) - inconsistent behavior of enemies (at times it's possible to shoot weapons next to them and have them not notice it) - cutscenes that can't be skipped (especially ones before boss fights) - no way to restart the current floor without dying - stealth level (a really big mistake that's not fun at all, just like hotline miami 2) - certain levels are so big they require guessing what's happening on the opposite site of the map - masks aren't unlocked by default (I didn't like having to unlock Tony again) Inconsistency and RNG are possibly the most frustrating aspect of this game, as they shift difficulty of the game towards luck, which should not be involved here at all. The GNU/Linux port seems to work well, although only a 32-bit binary is available, so mutilib is required, and it depends on obscure libraries such as nvidia-cg-toolkit, which required searching for by names, as it's not possible to simply guess their package names.

Dislike the art but the gameplay is challenging and addicting.

This game knows what it is, is sleek as hell, is very addictive and fun, and of course, very frustrating. I feel like there is plenty that could have been added, because the game overall is fairly simple. but what it does it does extremely well. It's a blast in till you hit a brick wall, and the best idea is to simply stop playing for a while and try another time. Really, for such a cheap price, I'd say to just get it and try it out. It's fun.

This game is a trip. The colors, the music and the action, I found it very engaging. Highly recommended if you're not sensitive to violence. I hope some day Dennaton makes a version of this game where different players can play it and compete, similar to Brawl Stars and others.