Hotline Miami is surreal, compelling, and unbelievably violent.
Most videogames sound more nasty and excessive once their events are written down.
Its sanitised, prepackaged, meaningless.
InHotline Miami,the reverse is true.
Its top-down, chunky, 16-bit-like graphics serve not to temper its bloodshed, but intensify it.
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Bad guys will turn and fire on you the split second you enter a room.
Often, youll be dead before youre entirely sure what it was that killed you.
No matter with a jab of the R key, youre back in the fray.
Although the emphasis gives the impression of on murder, Hotline Miami is really a puzzle game.
Masks add an extra layer of strategy.
Another turns doors into deadly weapons, while still another dampens the racket from a gunshot.
Its a minor gripe, but one that can sometimes lead to frustrating and avoidable deaths.
Its such a comical situation, its possibly an intentional inclusion on the part of the games creators.
A cloying sense of paranoia builds as the game progresses.
A shifty-eyed cleaner begins loitering outside your apartment.
Theres even the suggestion that everything thats happening is some sort of hallucination.
What can it all mean?
Pink numbers flash up bonuses as you slaughter gangsters to a deafening disco beat.
Brains ooze out of battered heads.
Windows shatter as shotgun blasts tear the protagonist apart.
Theres only one moment in Hotline Miami where the music falls away, and the mood shifts.
Once an areas cleared of enemies, the imperative Get to the car!
flashes up, leaving the player to walk back through the devastation theyve caused.
Even through the filter of its wilfully retro graphics, theres something horrific about the mess left behind.
Hotline Miamiis available for PC now from Steam and GOG.
Rating:
4 out of 5
