I don’t want to worry anyone, but I’m sure at some point you’ve seen a documentary on a serial killer and thought “I could do that” or “What an idiot getting caught, I’d have just done this”.
Hotline Miami showed me that in the world of spree-killers, I would be about as effective as if I tried to stop a train by spreading warm butter all over my face and sprinted, arse forward, in front of it.
These days, the phrase “indie game” makes my ears recoil with fear as it conjures up images of incomplete, early access games with a release date of this year but you’d actually be lucky to see it released before humans have evolved and sprouted wings.
Ever since the commercial release of Game Maker and RPG VX, everyone and their shitsu has thought they’re going to be the next Davey Wreden or Hideo Kojima. When actually they’re more likely to be the next Peter Molyneux or Sean Murray.
While once making games was limited to massive corporations with wallets the size of a Jesus’ balls, now all that’s required is a computer. This results into a 1 in a million chance of the game being even playable.
Hotline Miami defies these odds with faster reaction times than you’ll need to actually play the game and that’s fucking saying something.
This is almost as difficult as fucking Dark Souls. The difficulty curve is the equivalent of a 150g rollercoaster that melts your face off half way through.
You can’t make any mistakes if you expect to complete a level. The enemies will persuade that smirk off of your face with a baseball bat.
I’m not actually sure if I enjoyed the game. The pace is that of Arson Senna’s F1 crash and doesn’t really allow you the time to think, let alone formulate an opinion on it.
It’s actually quite refreshing to have a game that is a challenge rather than every game that is usually released being a piece of piss. The sense of satisfaction is unrivaled. When you complete a level in any other game, you get an achievement, that is your reward. Your reward in Hotline Miami is completing a level, sitting back and thinking “damn fucking right, you pile of shit, I completed you. I’m a fucking god!”
Those moments will be few and far between as the game makes you its ever hornier bitch and that just means that when you do eventually have the moment, it feels a thousand times better.
I went into Hotline Miami thinking I would hate it. I had casually glanced at screenshots and sneered at the games graphics thinking “I’m not interested in a game unless it has more polygons than a university maths classroom” but I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the style was at conveying its core concepts without having too many distractions.
As I casually suck the games dick, I don’t want you to leave this review thinking that anyone with an affinity for retro style, hardcore games should pick this up. It is the definition of hardcore.
If it was a person, it would exclusively read Tom Clancy books, have a shaved head, tattoos of swastikas and be about as friendly as a social justice warrior in a high school biology class.