Review: Hotline: Miami (PC)

Holy fucking shit, Hotline Miami.

This guy...agrees?

This is an amazing game. If you like games, you should buy it and play it awhile ago. Unless you abhor violence in all its forms, in which case you should stop reading and never play video games again.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way...this is an amazing game that just also happens to be about brutally murdering every human being you set eyes on throughout the game. You are rewarded for doing this in the most brazen and brutal ways you can think of.

With baseball bats, especially?

So...yeah. There's definitely a brilliance about H:M that appeals to me on a design level. The aesthetic is perfect: the music is incredible, the color palette suits the tone of the story and the action, the sound effects are a lot punchier and more affecting than they are in most AAA shooters, the controls feel weighty but not sluggish, etc. I could go on forever about how addicting the base gameplay is just because it feels so good in all of those ephemeral gameworld-building ways that so many other games fail at. This makes the game's blazing-fast action easy to come back to again and again...and you will, because you'll die a lot, but you'll always start over about ten feet away from where you died, and after you finally finish a level, you'll want to go back and try to finish the level again, this time doing it faster, or without dying, or using only knives, or spraying everyone with an assault rifle, etc. I don't think I've ever played a game that is so fundamentally addicting as Hotline: Miami is. It's a staggering achievement just in this regard.

And then there's the hyperviolence. This might bother you, as there's a lot of it. This doesn't bother me much, personally. Or, I should say, it doesn't bother me any more than the hyperviolence that exists in pretty much every video game, film, music video, comic book, etc. that we consume nowadays. In the context of the rest of our media culture, I don't find Hotline: Miami any more offensive than anything else. You should probably play it first before deciding for yourself, but in my opinion the violence is in a lot of ways a stylistic choice more than it is an excuse to splash yet more blood all over your screen.

Although it does do that, too.

It's not just violence for violence's sake here, at least not entirely. The game does a lot of interesting things with storytelling, perspective, and (simulated) sense distortion, and I really got a kick out of it. The devs were apparently heavily influenced by Drive, and so you might consider that as a reference. The revenge-laden story is in some ways just a scaffold to set up all the violence and bass drops and neon and letterman jackets, but I also found myself legitimately trying to untangle the nuances of the story at the end, and was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the "trippy" sequences between and during levels were displaying some pretty complex symbolism and hints at the resolution of some plot threads that I would have missed had I immediately written the game off as a another pointless shootfest.

I'm not really doing a great job of conveying how awesome this game is. From a purely mechanical standpoint, it's amazingly satisfying. All the blood and violence and such makes it a bit of a guilty pleasure to me, but it's hard to feel too bad about enjoying a game this fantastically made.

I know this sort of eliminates the reason for me having written any of this, but if you're interested at all in the game, you should read this. And then, presumably buy it and play it forever.