My eyes sting and my hands hang claw-like over the mouse and
keyboard. I have spent the last three or so hours hunched over my glowing
laptop dispensing quick precise death. Or at least for part of the time. The
rest has been taken up with frantic gasps between badly aimed gun shots,
misplaced punches, and strange backward movements which more often than not have
left me leaking florescent red stuff over some indistinguishable hotel
lobby.
It's hard to tell how many times I've died in Hotline Miami. But for all my failed
attacks and spilt blood I've also managed to successfully traverse the nine
levels which I've so far played and this in itself feels like an achievement. Like
several other games in recent years who have courted serious difficulty
tempered by satisfying gameplay, Hotline
Miami achieves its addictiveness through the quick, unhindered movement
from death to life. As quickly as you fall in these neon halls you promptly get
up again, ready to replay and replay until you either get the level perfectly
right or stumble upon a bit of savage luck.
Amidst all this dying and respawning, HLM 's real achievement is the pervasive sense of tension which is
applied to all aspects of the game. Every movement is a tense, quick action;
every wait charged with potential - the almost comically quick attack. And when
you aren't murdering criminals, in the game's perfectly brief downtime, the
florid 80s aesthetics work to extend you're violence into some kind of
recurring hallucination. It captures something of that sleazy, neon, coked-up brutality
which must have happened somewhere in
the 80s.
Tom Bramwell's excellent review for Eurogamer expressed this
well, drawing attention to how it works as a whole piece - unable to achieve its
effect without any one of its individual elements. In many ways this is clearly
true of the game. I feel like I've been snorting grotty lines of cut coke
because of the adrenaline procured from the horrifyingly tense combat along
with the gritty/glitzy dichotomy associated with the 1980s. However, I can't
help but feel that this enveloping sensation somewhat papers over some quite
glaring problems with the game.
The most obtrusive problem is that the AI is rubbish. Enemies
often respond quickly and brutally to any sound you make (even when you're not
making any sound!). This is perfectly fine as it forces you to be very clever
with your attacks and makes stealth one of the best ways to complete levels.
The problem occurs when enemies inexplicably do nothing.
One tactic which I've really enjoyed using in the later
levels - whose rooms are just too difficult for me to clear intelligently - is
finding a decent corner in a room with a good angle on the door and simply
gunning down the enemies from there. This of course needs a bit of gun
management as each weapon has a finite amount of ammo but it seems to work
quite well most of the time. The problem is when no one hears you! Trying to
get their attention when you're being stealthy is frustratingly easy but when
you're being blatantly loud they appear to know instinctively to stay on their
determined patrol paths. This could well be a clever bit of programming (and if
so, compliments to them) but I get the feeling it's not. It's also not unlikely
to have your enemies simply walk over a dead comrade without batting an eye
while another time they will search for you rigorously.
This all adds a level of unpredictability to the game which no
doubt adds to the games distinctiveness and arguably its charm. But in a game
which challenges the player to use precise and considered actions, these
niggles often really add unwanted
frustration. You could easily argue that it's just part of the game's brutality
but I feel like that's a bit of a copout in a game which works best when you
victories and defeats mostly come from personal considerations or mistakes. To
my mind it's a fair criticism of an otherwise brilliant game.
So far Hotline Miami has
left me shaking: clammy handed and heart pounding. It's no doubt one of the fiercest
and most twitchy game I've played in a while, but one whose style matches and perfectly
complements this gameplay. This isn't a violent gore-fest in the traditional
sense. There is measure and power behind the twitch controls and the violence:
sometimes precise, sometimes frenzied. It's made me feel stressed, desperate,
powerful, intelligent, brutal and satisfied - but also empty. At those moments
when everything is done; when the rooms are cleared of all virtual life, there
is a moment where all the adrenaline slowly fades and you walk back through the
remnant scenes of the level's violence. It's kind of profound - until it all
starts over again and then all that matters is killing.
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