I have to go. There was another call, there is no escape. A new mission, a new level, a new drill. Select the mask, put doubts aside, close your eyes and pull through. Restart. The neon colors blind me. Restart. The electronic synthesizer soundtrack burns me. Restart. Sneak in. Restart. No. Storm in. Restart. No. You have to be faster. Restart. No. You have to be smarter. No. Restart. No.
Kill them before they kill you. Room by room, house by house, level by level. The entire Russian mafia will fall, sooner or later. I'll get them all. To get revenge. Revenge for his murder. But does that matter? Does anything play a role in this story besides brutal, uncompromising violence? I have to choose my animal wisely, it gives me strength. Rasmus the owl. Restart. Tony the tiger. Restart. Ted the dog. Restart. I have to choose carefully. Again and again. Must try, must persevere. Restart. Stay tuned. Do not stop. Restart.
It's like a game. One brutal, psychedelic, fucked up game of chess. I only have one king. But they have so many pawns. Step by step, I have to take them off the field, but only one wrong step and my king falls. And so all success is gone. Restart. I am learning. Restart. I am becoming more experienced. Restart. As in a chess duel of the mind, I take an insight from every defeat for the next move. Step by step, I take their pawns out of the game, but increasingly learn not to lose my king. Restart. Two pawns fell, but I'm unlucky and a third finds me. Restart. Can I knock this door guard over there with one quick blow and then kill him? His comrade shoots me. Restart. Maybe I'll steal his gun first and- too slow. Restart. There is a way. There is a strategy. And I will find it through blood and sweat. I internalize the enemy constellation of this merciless chess field and in the end I maneuver myself through with an almost graceful slaughter, strengthened by dozens of defeats. There is no long delay between my attempts - no regrets, no waiting, no frustration. Restart, attack. Restart, attack. Restart, attack. Restart, attack. The colors, the hypnotic music and the never-ending loop of my attempts to crack the code send me into a frenzy. A rush of blood, a rush of puzzling - sometimes in vain. I fail dozens of times a minute. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart. Restart.
Do not give up. Restart. Persevere. Restart. No time for frustration. Restart. No time for anger. Restart. Don't thinkRestart. Act instinctively. Restart. Become an animal. Restart. Further. Restart. There are many ways to get there. I just have to find one, through D E T E R M I N A T I O N. And luck. Just one of the two is not enough. If I have mastered it through efforts to cross a room after hundreds of attempts, it is a small carelessness, a moment of greater deed, a kick of fate that one guard was hidden from me in the corner and is now shooting me. Just one hit and it was all in vain. Restart. Countless minutes have passed. But I will bring effort and luck together and turn the building into a graveyard. At long last. The vengeance must go on.
Restart.
Hotline Miami is known to pretty much every video game enthusiast in the world - the indie top down shooter in the gaudy pixel neon 80s flair was released for the PC in 2012 and literally hit like a bomb. It was considered one of the hardest games of its time. And both critics and gamers agreed - this is legendary.
I could never find any interest in it. As an extremely graphics-oriented person who can rarely get involved in optical experiments and art accidents, the deliberately backward mud graphics, which undoubtedly took a lot of getting used to, were an absolute no-go. Even the demanding shooter gameplay did not appeal to me, and since PC games were nothing more than a funny curiosity for me at that time, this hype passed me by like many others.
However, a few months ago I was able to get a large number of PS Vita games for very little money, and as luck would have it, one of them was Hotline Miami. Why not? I thought to myself and played in to see what was true about the notorious top dog in the pixel world. A crazy trip began.
I could hardly rationalize how I found the game in the first place or how unbearably ugly I found it before I had pressed the restart button until it almost fell off. Hotline Miami is a playful frenzy. The plot is roughly about our protagonist Jacket, who for some reason is systematically wiping out the Russian mafia. He keeps getting ominous calls that send him to his next place of action, visits a bearded friend before every murder attempt, has to deal with disturbing delusions and ultimately turns into an animal again and again - literally.
The story doesn't matter, completely irrelevant, that's not what Hotline Miami is about. Of course, if you read in a little, connect points and, according to the fans, play the final second part, the result is a well thought-out and cool construct. But honestly? It just doesn't matter. The plot is banal and, as to be expected in a pixel amok shooter, secondary at best. And what was there of more memorable moments, I have regularly long since forgotten in the lengthy and sweaty gameplay sections in between.
The graphics are, in my opinion, quite terrible, albeit coherent and, after a while, with its anarchistic neon tones and accents of violence, to a certain extent appropriate. Above all, the grotesque face graphics of the main and secondary characters stand out negatively for me, which are certainly part of the intended style, but for me make up a good deal of the 'eccentricity' of Hotline Miami. The picture wobbles, collapses and flickers, everything smells of retro times.
The music. Nobody talks about Hotline Miami without talking about the soundtrack. The entire game is designed to be a frenzy. To catch the player in a spiral. None of this would work without the driving, hypnotic music, which breathes pure 80s vibe even more than the setting and the graphics. I mean, just listen to this.
This music is your only companion on the hunt, your only comrade in the fight against the unfair levels, your only protection against the frustration that builds up in you after you have just died for the hundredth time in the first room of a level. The music pieces do not reset with your death, but persistently accompany the level until you have finally completed it. The soundtrack of Hotline Miami is certainly a matter of taste, but struck me as outstanding, although I'm not a fan of synth-electro. The mixture between the tapering sounds, the bloody-colored levels and your own high concentration just works too well. And damn it, the crowning glory of the entire soundtrack is this piece, which perfectly captures the tension, drama, and intransigence of the boss fight. Listen to it and let it work.
(Paragraph contains slight spoilers regarding the last boss fight. + Music)
After you have slaughtered through countless hours and hundreds of frustrated, dogged attempts through various levels and countless Mafia mobs, you are finally facing the last boss who seems to be responsible for everything. The big beast of the russian mafia. There is not much talk. You'll get to the point in a moment. Two panthers. They will tear you apart like cat food. Restart. Restart. Restart. But as you observe their behavior, you learn how to kill them. One, two, over. The music roars in your ears and you are happy about the fallen animals, when a quick blow from the female samurai bodyguard kills you and puts you back in front of the kittens. Restart. Again she kills you. How do you defeat her? Bit by bit, try after try, you rush through the room, the panthers, try to survive, try to find the weak point of the samurai. The music doesn't stop booming. There is no escape because you are not ready to give up. You find her weak point and the bodyguard falls. The music doesn't stop and you die from the boss himself. Restart. Go on.
The gameplay is the essence we have to talk about in Hotline Miami. I have already described enough what it is roughly about - you are a pixel man who penetrates houses and kills guards who are standing and patrolling armed to the teeth room after room. Or bloodthirsty dogs. God, those damn bastards. Before you can go to the next floor Everyone has to die. And the opponents are not stupid, at least not completely - if you get caught in a murder, they will chase you.
The important trick in the game are the animal masks - at the beginning of each level you choose an animal mask for you, which you unlock gradually and which give you special abilities such as faster running or increased invisibility. Overall, I didn't find this gameplay element all that important, as learning the levels is much more elementary than the lax auxiliary skills, but especially in more specific levels such as those with many dogs, skills like immunity to dogs can tip the scales.
You can kill opponents unarmed to get their weapons, or knock them out with an opening door if they are behind it. You can slice your way through levels with melee weapons or try to mow everything down with firearms - but be careful, they make noise and attract EVERY mafioso around like prostitutes in heat.
My personal path After a few levels was always the same: grab melee weapon, kill opponents, hide behind a corner, repeat. Or quickly storm into a room and kill all opponents in it before they can react. I only used firearms when it was absolutely necessary, for example to lure opponents to me. Because, and this is absolutely one point of criticism of Hotline Miami, the firing mechanics are extremely unbalanced and only one of several points why the game is so 'difficult', downright unfair and disgustingly frustrating - while aiming with firearms is incredibly inaccurate for the player and works fiddly, so that you can shot twenty times at an attacking opponent without hitting even a single time, firing opponents DO NOT HAVE to aim at all - because the programming works differently for them. Enemy NPCs aren't programmed to turn around, find you, and then shoot. Instead, they turn around and shoot. That sounds similar, but there is a world of difference -
While humans usually need a small moment to aim, especially if they are surprised, the opposing AI simply reads the position of the player on the map and fixates on it, so that a shot from armed opponents are always IMMEDIATELY when sighted and mostly hit - restart. Because of course you're dead after just one attack. Incredibly unfair and hair-raising. And one of the reasons why guns in Hotline Miami are only suitable for the very, very tough - taking two quick steps with a crowbar and beating everyone up is simply more effective. And quieter.
The other is that the levels (of course) are getting more and more ridiculous and beastier. You will be thrown at very sophisticated and perfidious spatial and enemy constellations that simply cannot be defeated - unless you fail. Fifty times. A hundred times. The structure must become part of your flesh and blood. Of course, I'm primarily just talking about my experience here - many players are better than me. But not that many.
Another big problem with the game balance is the fact that you can of course only see to a limited extent - but not your opponents. And so it happens over and over and over again that an armed opponent shoots you at the end of the room or a hallway, outside of your field of vision, and everything is gone. If that happens at the beginning of a level, whatever. If it happens at the end, after 30 opponents, you will see red.
The natural way with which your deaths are integrated into the game are both a blessing and a curse - the main reason and the great stroke of genius by developer Damnation Games is actually a simple but often underestimated trick - your death does not mean waiting. No annoying YOU DIED screen, no music change, no loading time, it continues immediately. You barely have time to get angry. Build up frustration. Because you throw yourselves back in immediately, keep fighting, keep on gnawing. Restart.
The perceived disadvantage of this fluid gameplay, however, is that the opponents insolently erase you out of life fluently, a small knife stab there, a fixed head shot here, and that sometimes thirty times in a row in the same place. At times you want to roar and curse inside and out. When you get stuck and simply do not let yourself out of the game because how it works and the opponents, in what feels like smugness, take pleasure in squashing you like an annoying fly. But at some point you have cracked the individual code of a level and also get the necessary bit of luck on top of that. The gameplay is like a chess game, as I have already mentioned above - you have to maneuver yourselves room by room as if with chess pieces and plan how to throw off this and that piece, but also always include how the pieces behind them, next to them or nearby react to it so that you are not getting checkmated by them. Certain weapons usually beat certain other weapons - long guns are more effective than short ones, without a gun you cannot kill dogs, which in turn are too fast for slow firearms, thicker opponents are immune to melee weapons, and so on and so forth. It takes more planning, puzzling and thinking in Hotline Miami than you might think. At least if you're just very, very bad at games like that like me.
The final boss fight (spoiler included in the paragraph) is a good example of the peculiar, strategic depth of the slaughtering fights: Actually, completely anti-climatically, it only consists of a few correct hits, with which you first have to kill two domestic panthers, a single hit that is enough to defeat the bodyguard of the boss and finally two more hits to end the fight. If done correctly, it takes a few seconds. But trying to figure out how to use the level build-up and start all over again after every restart, still the adrenaline-charged boss theme in your ear, pulls your nerves and ensures a worthy finale. A worthy, shitty, filthy finale.
Conclusion
I want to be completely honest again - Actually, this review should be a mere hate war in which I identify Hotline Miami as the unfair, sadistic and unjustly internationally celebrated indie filth as I saw it while gritting my teeth through the increasingly unfair and demanding levels. If you know me or if you follow my game reports a little, you quickly notice that I don't like difficult games too much - I tend to label them as unfair and unbalanced when I am not up to them. And so I wanted to denigrate Damnation Games right after playing through Hotline Miami after a few exhausting weeks because they believe that they had created something really great, but which is actually just excessive trash.
And then the but. It happened again, which is a thorn in my hater's soul - the game, its soundtrack and its larger concept have seeped into me and caused another rethink. By the way one of the reasons why you shouldn't write a review emotionally loaded. Hotline Miami is - from my point of view - none of the cases that I wrongly described as unfair and unbearably difficult and nagging and pissing and random. It is all of that. But does it want to be different? Does it want to be 'fair'? Do games really always have to be fair? I don't know, but the intoxication and the demands that Hotline Miami subjected me to because I was SIMPLY! NOT! READY! TO! GIVE! UP! wanted countered my anger and resignation. The immediacy of death prevented me from throwing my Vita into a corner with a grunt - I was often on the verge of it, but the concentration was stronger. And the unwillingness to buy a new console.
Hotline Miami has to put up with the accusation of having programmed many elements of the gameplay improperly, carelessly or deliberately in a poor manner. Especially later levels are just completely disproportionately difficult and limited in the possibilities of the player, so that at some point it really only depends on luck. The game is unfair and I hate it. But maybe it wants that.
You just have to ask yourself if you want that. Because contrary to brands like Dark Souls, Undertale or Super Meatboy, Hotline Miami never gave me any fun. The brutal and rewarding feeling of happiness when mastering a seemingly impossible level or boss did not materialize. I was never happy to have mastered the challenge - I was just relieved that finally another level was behind me. Hotline Miami is never fun, at least that's my lasting impression. All it gives you in the end is the rush of your own intransigence. And the knowledge that you somehow beat it. If that's enough, throw the first stone and get the game. If you are looking for something even remotely fun or even fair and are not willing to spend many hours in small levels with little or no progress, you should stick with your Journey, League of Legends or Pokemon.
And yes, Hotline Miami 2 will probably end up with me sooner or later. I don't know exactly why. But I want that high again.
7/10 bikers for Hotline Miami
- Yoraiko
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