But it's not so much the music alone as the way it folds into the rest of Hotline Miami's aesthetic. The thing a lot of people mention is the music, which is a sort of hazy neon electronica that thickens the air around you the way the music stops whenever you kill the last guy on the level is certainly startling and abrupt.
I don't know why I like the Don - I haven't thought about it. I'm a sucker for the horse-faced Don Juan, who gives you a bonus for face-kicks. The masks give you certain boons - quiet gunshots, extended view, start with a shotgun, dogs don't attack you, etc. The weapons aren't things you pre-select or anything like that - they are just added to the random rotation of sick tools that cycle through various spawn points within the levels, so you might enter a mafia den and find a knife lying in the lobby to start with, only to restart a few seconds later and discover a samurai sword or sledgehammer instead. You get these when you start totting up high scores for each level. Then again, maybe I love it because of the animal mask and weapon unlocks. As you get more confident, you probably do try obvious things like only using melee weapons or taking enemies out in a different order to see if that works - but mostly these strategies enter into your thinking subconsciously because you fail in such a way that a new idea emerges. But it's just as intense and funny if you spend the whole time kiting enemies into doorways so you can spray them with machinegun fire. The game doesn't really lean on you to do this it gives you a rating at the end of each level, which can be polite or savage, and the Steam Achievements are all things like "kill two guys by throwing one brick". Try again.Īctually, maybe it all works because once you get into a rhythm with it, you try different things. But it's not frustrating it's amazing slapstick fun. But you and your enemies move so fast that even the best-planned encounters - the ones where you've lurked outside a door for half a minute and plotted everyone's downfall - often fall apart because you aren't Neo from The Matrix. The controls are just WASD, spacebar to straddle downed enemies, and the mouse buttons to pick up, use and throw weapons. Or maybe it's because the controls and difficulty are so unforgiving that nine times out of ten you get killed instead, at which point you tap 'R' to restart the floor of the building you're on.
SUPER HOTLINE MIAMI FULL
You move through colourful buildings full of angry little guys, and each room is like that bit at the end of a Mexican standoff when someone pulls the trigger and everyone dies in a split second: you crash through a door, which knocks a guy to the ground, then sprint six feet to cut a guy's throat before he can raise his weapon, quickly throw the knife backwards as someone bursts through the doorway to investigate the commotion, and then straddle the guy you knocked out and smash his head to mush on the concrete floor.
Maybe it's the fact that I love super-violent top-down action games, because Hotline Miami is an immaculate super-violent top-down action game. Something made me play through it all in one go, which took about two hours, and then go into the kitchen for a glass of water, return to my desk, and play through it all over again.
I've been trying to figure out what it is about Hotline Miami that really works on me, because something clearly does.