Hotline Miami Review

It is a rare game that dares to question why it sends us on homicidal rampages. Hotline Miami does it cleverly and subversively by casting us as a schizophrenic hitman who compulsively kills a small army of thugs for reasons even he doesn't understand. Even though it makes very little literal sense, the surreal, hallucinogenic story gives a lot more to ponder than the typical Grand Theft Auto scenario of being a bad man who kills everyone in my path to building a criminal empire. If this were a less punishing, frustrating game, I might even have loved it.



I've certainly had some great moments that made me feel like a top-down, eight-bit Jason Statham. Moments like when I stormed into a room and knocked one white-suited '80s gangster down with the door, brained another with a baseball bat, hurled the bat at the guy across the room before he could level his shotgun, turned and punched an assailant coming at me with a knife, picked up the knife and slashed the first guy who'd since recovered from the door in his face, then flung myself onto the man on the ground and killed him with his own knife. Darkly hilarious, blocky gore spews from victims when struck by various weapons, leaving levels spattered with red and escaping intestines. It's an exhilarating thrill when it goes right.

Fast, Furious, Frustrating

Yet for every one of those thrills there are roughly 20 frustrating failures where it's my brain spattered on the floor. Action is blindingly fast, and thanks to our fragile protagonist, there is no margin for error. Unless you're a ninja at this kind of retro 2D top-down action game, getting to the end of most of the 19 levels is likely going to require a mass grave's worth of trial-and-error deaths. That'd be fine (in the same way that Super Meat Boy's punishing platforming is rewarding) except that every time you die, Hotline Miami changes things. They're subtle alterations, like which weapons are available and the routes guards patrol, creating just enough of a difference that the approach that got me through an area before is just as likely to get me killed the next time.


For example, one of the tips that frequently appears on loading screens claims "Guards are predictable," but in my experience that seems like a lie. Usually a guard facing away from me will be easy pickings, but every so often one will whirl and blast my face off with a shotgun the moment I step through a door. Sometimes a guy will spot me and chase me down across a level, others he'll go about his business. Sometimes one enemy will hear a gunshot, other times a half dozen respond. Usually they'll die with one bullet, but other times they'll get up again, grab a gun, and shoot me. Every time something like that happens, it makes me feel a little more cheated and angry. The occasional crash bugs didn't help.

Random Crimes

Normally I'm a huge advocate of randomization in games -- it is, in fact, one of my very favorite things. Unpredictability, after all, is what makes games replayable, and the more random they get, the more interesting those replays can potentially be. However, Hotline Miami's lightning-fast pace sabotages the value of its randomization -- by the time I notice something's different, I'm usually already dead. You can look ahead by pushing shift, but if I can't predict how enemies will behave, I have no chance to react and change my tactics to suit this new scenario. Trying to learn from what went wrong is futile because that scenario is already gone. As a result, many of my victories felt like dumb luck -- that the randomization happened to line up with what I expected it to be that time.


Deaths don't cause downtime at least, thanks to the instant respawns which keep the pace moving smoothly. The only time this doesn't happen is during the terrible boss fights, which compound their unfairness by making you sit through several seconds of dialog and animation before you can get back to the business of getting killed again, with only the catchy soundtrack to console you. And then there's the single stealth-only level, which is just plain awful.

Dead Man Walking

I found myself eager for Hotline Miami to end before it did (after about eight hours) and had little desire to return to improve my scores. If I did, I'd definitely appreciate that the special-ability-granting animal masks, such as the unicorn that silences your gunshots (his name's Peter, by the way) add a dozen or so replayability options for the OCD completionist types. Plus, they really turn the weirdness up to 11, and make sure that any doubt the protagonist is utterly insane is completely removed.

Getting gamers to not only sit still and take this kind of abuse, but to actively enjoy it, is an extremely delicate balancing act. Hotline Miami comes close, but ultimately tumbles down on the side of too unfair and too punishing to really be good fun -- unless, of course, you consider a game like this to be a gauntlet thrown at your feet by the developer. In that respect, it's certainly a very interestingly presented challenge.