Hotline Miami PC Review

Story isn’t really what Hotline Miami is about, sure there are elements in place to give things a little context at times, such as people wearing chicken masks telling you “you’ve done some bad things” and a toothless weird guy telling you how the controls through the medium of putting a baseball through someone’s head.

Controls are simple when it comes to this game, with the usual WASD being used for movement, mouse pointer for turning, left mouse for attack, right mouse for pickup / throw and middle mouse to lock on. Making the game play and control like a hybrid twin-stick shooter at the best of times. It’s not the easiest thing to control and does take a little getting used to, either that or I just utterly sucked at the game for the first half hour, both are likely.

At first glance the game reminds me of the top down perspective carnage of the original GTA games, for those of you a litter younger than me, I am of course talking about the Grand Theft Auto games from the Playstation 1 era. The similarity soon ends though as this game isn’t anything like I expected.

It has more in common with something like Super Meat Boy, with compact and demanding levels full of instant death for you to work your way around. Run in with your fists swinging  bats flying and guns blazing and you’ll likely find your self deader than flared trousers. One hit and it’s death for you, but life begins just as quickly as life ends in Hotline Miami thanks to that old game favourite “tap R to retry”, just so you can get your head bashed in another 50 times before you figure you way around the level.

This is essentially a puzzle game with weapons. You’ve got to learn where each enemy of each level starts from, time your attacks and think a little about what weapon you should or shouldn’t pick up at that time, one wrong swing and your right back at the start of the level.