Hotline Miami
Murder most foul
Psychotic, dark, and bloody, Hotline Miami is a top down, third person action game with retro pixilated graphics.
I guess the first thing I should mention about it is that this is definitely not a nice story. This is a story about bad people doing very bad things to other bad people, mostly. Oh and occasionally the police when they get in your way.
You play as some...guy. He has no in-game name and they refer to him only as ‘Jacket’ on the wiki, due to the fact that he’s wearing a jacket I guess.
Wow that’s kind of lame. Moving on.
Anyway, the story goes like this. It’s 1989 and you apparently live in Miami. You get phone calls from some mysterious source giving you cryptic orders. Go to the address they tell you to and you kill everyone there. Don’t worry though, everyone you’ll ever encounter in these levels will kill you six ways from sunrise if they even begin to sense your presence, and they are mostly heavily armed Russian mobsters, so it’s all good.
So you’re some kind of hitman or cleaner for some rival crime organization I never really figured out. I think they’re called 50 Blessings or something. Your job is to single-handedly depopulate the Russian mob for your amoral bosses, all while wearing various animal masks and grooving to the psychedelic soundtrack.
If that sounds really hard, well that’s only because it is.
Hotline Miami feels at times like a straight up murder simulator. Though the graphics are retro/8 bit there are some things that just look nasty, regardless of graphical quality. I will say though that the violent and gory ways you can dispatch your enemies can at times feel very satisfying, especially if you’re on your 40th or 50th attempt on a level and your frustration is starting to peak.
This game is definitely not for the faint of heart or those with weak stomachs.
Oh and if you want something easy, this game is definitely not for you either. A single hit from anything will kill you.
Here is what you will be doing most of the time while playing Hotline Miami:
See your first armed enemy in the game. They act much faster than you do.
Die.
Walk around the corner and get shot from an enemy that is off screen.
Die.
Attack someone with melee weapon or fists. You suck at this.
Die.
Knock someone out. Bludgeon their face with something only to have someone else walk around a corner and blow you away.
Die.
Get shot from multiple directions.
Die.
Use a human shield. Everyone shoots straight through them or shoots you from behind.
Die.
See a dog. Wait, dogs? Wha-? Get throat ripped out.
Die.
Get a gun and shoot at enemies. Miss repeatedly. Attract every enemy in the area to your position.
Die.
Throw gun at enemy and knock them out. Get attacked by someone else and deal with them, only to have the first enemy get to their feet, take your gun and immediately shoot you with it.
Die.
Attempt to throw things at dogs, only dogs cannot get hit by thrown weapons of any kind. Get mauled repeatedly until you finally figure this out.
Diediediediediediedie.
Attempt to melee large enemies. Discover that large enemies can only be killed by guns.
Die.
Attempt to use doors to knock down dogs like you can with humans. This does NOT work.
Die.
Fight your first boss. You have no weapon. There’s a golf club in a bag right over there by the boss. It is your only chance so you must grab it. Arm yourself after much difficulty and discover that he appears to be completely immune to your attacks.
Diediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediedie diediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediedie diediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediedie diediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediedie.
Ohhh, wait! So that’s the ONLY way to beat this boss. Ahhhh, I see now.
Die repeatedly anyway.
Give up.
Die.
Scream at the screen in frustration.
Die.
Realize that you are in a Kafkaesque Hell wherein you must repeat the same damn sequences, reread the same damn dialogues, and replay the same damn levels over and over and over again until you can somehow succeed at them...only to go on to the next level which is pretty much just more of the same.
Die.
Search fruitlessly through the in-game menu for some kind of difficulty setting. Alas, there is only one difficulty and it is BRUTAL.
Die.
For a while, you no longer care at all about dying. You now care only about REVENGE and causing copious amounts of bloody pain to your tormentors.
Die.
Groove to the music while getting repeatedly killed by throwing yourself recklessly at enemies because you straight up do not give a fuck anymore.
Die.
Wonder if the game is some kind of amoral social experiment the devs are running on people. Ponder also the possibility that you have somehow been forced back in time to an era where sadistic arcade games were designed to be all but unwinnable in order to eat your money...only this game does not cost quarters and you realize that the arcade games are actually more forgiving than this.
Die.
Discover that enemies can shoot you through windows.
Die.
Pull off insane, bloody combos involving breaking skulls, throwing knives, shooting up everything, kiting and outmaneuvering enemies, and stand victoriously over a bloody pile of corpses waving a drill while you rage and spit profanities at the screen.
Die anyway.
Attempt to hide.
Die.
Wait patiently to ambush enemies. Peer carefully around the map with the button which extends your sight range. Memorize enemy patrol patterns and dispatch them carefully and quietly.
Do not die. Get your playstyle rated by the game as ‘generic’ and never get a time bonus again so long as you play carefully and are patient.
Discover that no matter how carefully you play, things will still kill you, because enemy AI behavior will inexplicably change. They will be in different positions or will open doors they didn’t before, killing you unexpectedly.
Die.
Trudge your way to the end of the game, pretty much motivated by sheer rage and a stubborn refusal to give up at this point. Understand that Hotline Miami players who are better than you will likely respond to all of your complaints by saying something incredibly asinine like git gud.
Die.
Confront the final boss. Get torn apart by his pet panthers.
Die.
Finally manage to kill panthers, only to fight the boss’s personal ninja bodyguard, a lady with a katana and throwing stars...only this is not so much of a fight as it is a ‘get killed forever’ scenario. There is only ONE way to kill her and you do not know it. You cannot dodge her attacks and she kills you so quickly you have almost no time to try anything before she does so. Mess up fighting the panthers before you even get to her.
Die times infinity.
Realize she is only the penultimate boss and that the main boss will likely kill you even faster than she does.
Shut off game and walk away.
Well, that’s what I did at the end anyway.
Look, I get it. You guys think modern games are too easy. You looked at the hardest games of our time and said, “Laaaaame.”
Hotline Miami is essentially a twitch reflex shooter. Twitch slightly the wrong way and you’re dead. Don’t react fast enough and you’re dead. If your attacks are slightly mistimed or slightly off, you’re dead. If your enemy is close enough to hit you at the same time you hit them, you’re dead. If your enemy can shoot you at the same time you shoot them, you’re dead. Unless you know the exact strategy to kill a boss, you will not be able to progress further in the game, but if your skills aren’t that good, you simply may not be able to figure it out or be able to implement the strategy once you do.
The game tanks your score if you don’t play like a reckless psychotic in an animal mask or if you kill all of your enemies the same way, never mind the fact that they can kill you arguably faster than you can kill them. Enemies can sense you behind them too, so if they’re facing the other way, that’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to sneak up on them and take them out. Also, there’s probably someone else with a gun covering that guy, waiting to shoot you when you attempt it.
As you play the game, you collect different animal masks. These masks give you combat bonuses, but the uses for some of them are pretty unclear. Most of them are straightforward, but choosing the wrong mask for the level can make things even more stupidly hard than they are normally. For instance, there’s one mask that allows you to move faster, which would’ve been a godsend if I’d had it on during any of the boss fights, but I didn’t know the boss fights were coming, so I didn’t.
Bottom line is, Hotline Miami is really freaking unforgiving. If you like that sort of thing, than this is the game for you.
As for the story? The writing is fairly interesting, but due to how amoral, messed up, and downright evil most of the people in the game are, I just can’t bring myself to care much about any of them. I mean, there’s even a level where you storm into a police station and kill all of the cops just to get to someone they have in a holding cell.
Other than the cops and some nurses in a hospital level, there is exactly one person who is not a horrible murderer. As soon as I realized that, I knew they were going to kill them off and sure enough, I was right. That person only has only one line of dialogue in the game though, so I didn’t really care about them either.
You can’t just tell the player to care about someone. You need to add elements that might actually make the players care about them. As it is, this serves primarily as motivation for the main character to go on yet another killing spree, not really all that different from any of the other killing sprees he’s done lately and that’s about it.
The storytelling here is pretty minimalistic and it can be easy to miss at times. There are newspaper clippings detailing your rampages that you collect in your house and there are rumors from the people you talk to in between missions about other masked killers, but these sequences can be inadvertently skipped if you go back into your car and drive off, which I did so once by accident.
Also there are these weird segments where you talk to people wearing some of the animal masks you collect. They don’t do much except ask you cryptic questions and are rude to you, but they do set the stage for yet another ‘Is this really happening?’ scenario.
Turns out, I don’t really care. The plot is just an excuse to go kill things and I was okay with doing that when it was nothing but a series of cryptic phone calls.
Apparently there are other characters you can play as with their own story, but I’m not sure I even want to finish Jacket’s story, let alone anyone else’s. Oh and there’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’m going to get it.
I’ve kind of had enough Hotline Miami for now.