Hotline Miami

Platform: PC - Steam
Price: £6.99
Developer: Dennaton Games
Genre: Indie action
Overall rating: 4/5

Hotline Miami is quite simply awesome. Before I start mumbling on about how much I love various parts of the game, let me start by giving you a quick run down of what the game actually is.

The game has amazing artwork - not like the modern graphics that we come to expect, but stylised 8-bit 2D, psychedelic 80s top-down visuals, that just seem so apt and well executed, that you don't give the lack of shading or polygons a second thought. It is a brutal high-octane action game that involves killing loads of people in numerous ways with a mixture of melee weapons and guns (all of which can be thrown if you felt so inclined - useful to get a bit extra use out of a gun that just ran out of ammo). Each level will bring you to the entrance of a building, each floor (where multiple are involved) will comprise of various rooms with anywhere from 1 to ~6 enemies. Enemies sometimes stay where they are with periodic rotation (a bit like some Pokémon trainers used to do), or they'll (most likely) be walking along some sort of path, which you'll need to watch closely for the opportune moment.

One of the main things to watch out for on this game, is the pace at which it can go wrong. If the enemy has a gun and spots you from just outside of your vision, you're fairly screwed, similarly dogs can see you from outside your vision and attack at high speed - with a gun, you're fairly okay if you spot it on time, but if you're using a melee weapon you'll need good timing and reflexes. Death in Hotline Miami is my favourite compared to most other games - if I fail a level in whatever manner, I don't want to sit there looking at level stats, or a cinematic pan across the level with "MISSION FAILED" for 30 seconds - I just want to try again! With Hotline Miami, getting back into the action is made quick and painless - which it needs to be, because you will die. A lot.

Some of the weapons are: knife, pipe, golf club, briefcase, baseball bat, pistol, shotgun, assault rifle (plus more). The variety is great, and what's better is it's pretty easy to get your hands on all of them. You can choose a weapon to start with, and if you see an enemy with the weapon you want, just kill them and pick it up. No teasing like you get in other games, where you kill someone that clearly has something awesome, and they just drop nothing or something useless and unrelated - Hotline Miami gives you what you want.Weapons

An extra game mechanic which is very useful and can be used tactically on different levels (sometimes a must), is the masks. You get different animal masks which provide a different boost/trait to your character. Depending on the mask you could get a bonus such as: lethal doors, faster walking, quiet gunshots, faster melee kills, extra ammo and some more. I love this mechanic as it can completely change a level run if you make the right choice.Game mechanics

As it's quite hard to describe in words, I think it's probably best to leave it there for you to check out the screenshots below and I'll also add some gameplay footage as soon as I can. At the end of the day, if you like killing stuff, buy Hotline Miami - it's great fun.