How far did you get? Finished one playthrough, including the resolution and bonus mission.
Hotline Miami is an indie game concoction of a lot of different kinds of games. The best way I can think to describe it is to say it has the visuals and gameplay from the first Metal Gear (8-bit and all), the ultraviolence and weird story of something like Killer 7, and that "keep dying until you figure out how to not die" challenge you got from Dark Souls.
So does all of that somehow work?
It does, indeed!
The gameplay is incredibly fast for what I would call a stealth game. If an enemy notices you, you might have a second to react before you're dead. You only get one life, too, but dying isn't too much of a hassle. Each time you die, you'll only have to start over at the beginning of the floor you're on in the building. Some enemies have guns, some have melee weapons, and some are, well, dogs. You get to put on a mask before each level, each giving you a different advantage. I must say that several of the masks you unlock seemed kind of pointless. I played with the mask that made dogs not attack you for about 7 levels, and once I unlocked the quiet gun mask, I didn't touch another mask the rest of the game.
The stealth is done quite well. Your instincts will tell you to go after those guns, but that's not always a good idea, especially early in the level. If you fire off a gun, you can expect a good portion of the people and dogs on the floor to hear it and come after you. It's hard enough to take on one 90 mph asshole with a shotgun, so you can imagine what it's like taking on six of them. Probably my favorite way to take out enemies is to knock them down using a door, then jumping on them and beating the immortal piss out of them. It's quite satisfying.
I would say the game looks purposely bad, but I don't think it's fair to say it looks bad. Sure, it looks like an old Nintendo game, but it's colorful and trippy and induces feelings of both excitement and freaking out. For a game as unusual as this, you'd expect some weird art, and this definitely delivers that. There is blood everywhere, and the enemies die in enough different ways that you can play through the entire game and not get bored of it.
Another thing worth mentioning is the music. I always thought 8-bit game music sounded odd and interesting anyway, but this game's music fits that definition like a glove, even if it's not really 8-bit music. It's a bit meatier, though, with some hard hitting beats and a dance music feel.
I don't want to say too much about the story, but suffice to say it's pretty interesting, and creepy. The general idea is you wake up to a message on your answering machine that gives you a totally random message, but hides an address in each one. You go to the address, kill everyone there, then go to a restaurant or video store and talk to some weird guy. Then you go home. You do this for most of the levels, but everything gets progressively more unusual, particularly the sections when you talk to the strange guy.
I'm not going to say this is one of the most unique gameplay experiences I've had. I've played games that play similar to this before, but none of them were anywhere near as well executed as this. The game has very low system requirements, so if you have a PC of any kind, I'd highly recommend checking out the hidden gem.
9/10
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