Hotline Miami

Run. Swing. Swing. Run. Throw. Finish. Pick up. Shoot. Drop. Swing. Throw. Pick – you’re dead! Press r to restart. And you will restart, because you want to beat this game! Hotline Miami is an action/arcade game in which you play as Jacket, a man receiving mysterious phone calls. The calls are thinly veiled instructions – ‘Got a few kids that need to be disciplined here. I’m at East 7th Street.’ You drive to the specified location, don a mask and proceed to kill everyone before moving to the next floor. It’s one hit one kill for your enemies, but also for you, so you have to plan carefully. When you finish the level, Hotline Miami does not change to a cutscene or any other such convention. Instead the game deploys the brilliant touch of requiring you to backtrack to your car, traversing the piles of bloodied corpses. The electrifying music of the level is replaced by a sombre drone, forcing you to think of your actions. One of the characters asks: ‘Do you like hurting people?’ How appropriate; killing enemies is fun – bright neon colours and excellent game mechanics make for addictive gameplay. Soon you will adapt a rhythm in your movement and actions, almost hypnotised by the beat of the music. Death for the player is frequent, but rarely undeserved or punishing. You simply start again from the floor you were on, then adapt a different strategy. Since enemies always start in the same location, the game is like a puzzle. Progression through each floor becomes an elaborately choreographed dance of carnage, with bonus points for style and swiftness of level completion. Utilise various weapons to achieve success. Kill or be killed depending on your split second reaction timing. All the while pondering the questions provoked by the game: Who are the masked personas that visit you at different stages? What are they? Is any of this real? And most of all, are we becoming desensitized to violence? Actually, don’t worry about that. It’s just a game, one of crudely rendered, pixellated bloodshed that can easily be distanced from reality. Just a game. None of it’s real. Hotline Miami brilliantly evokes a hellish nightmare of violence and retribution, thanks to its minimalist, abstract storyline and intense gameplay. Additional masks with bonuses grant replay value as different strategies can be tried. However, even without the masks I would play this game many times over. Highly recommended.

This game is really, really fun and addictive. Every map is your slaughterhouse.

A top down brawler/shooter. Don your mask and ready your fists as you carry out hits on various people. Its visual style is very distinct. Very colourful considering the content. The character portraits are... weird to say the least, but it fits with the game's style somewhat. It has pretty nice, electronic/synthy music too. The gameplay is fast paced, brutal and nearly every participant in combat dies one hit from weapons, including you, so the risk is high. Extremely high. A bit too high for me. At some point this just got to be too hard for me to find it enjoyable mostly. At a certain point I just kept going out of stubbornness and a desire to see the ending, which I felt mostly indifferent to at the end of it. I guess it can be your thing if you like your games severely hard.

Hotline Miami is more than a game, it is an experiment on the human psyche, and also a statement on the gamer culture. It is also political and punk. This thing blew my brains out and I am still collecting them from the floor. I hated it, I loved it. Hotline Miami is so simplistic, but yet so refined, and it aged well like a fine wine.

Not much to say that hasnt already been said here in the reviews. I Just wanted to up vote the game some more :D