(I haven't "really" beaten it, but the credits rolled, and that's my only criteria for making a review on backloggd. if you wanna make a game that ends halfway through, you're facing the consequences)

really fast, frantic fun. i'm not a huge fan of plots that are deliberately obfuscated, because it's antithetical to the idea of a "plot", but it's fun. it felt like even if i tried to disect the plot in real time, the game wouldn't try to justify my effort, so i stopped trying

oh, the gameplay? fun! my mouse malfunctioned as i was playing to occaisionally burn mouse1s, but it was still great. i wish the levels were actually designed tighter, and the masks were mostly cosmetic. enemies were a little frustratingly omnipotent, but that's a small nitpick.

Boy, do I FUCKING HATE some parts of hotline miami. It has buggy, inconsistent AI. Bullets that pass through enemies. Weird, ugly character portraits. Dialogue that is almost entirely insignificant, besides 4-5 lines, until the very end. Doors. Its mostly doors, actually. Fuck doors. And Trauma. It's all of those things. And it's also an incredibly satisfying arcade twinstick shooter, with one of the most addicting, endorphin-releasing gameplay loops i've ever played, with an incredibly charming 80's-esque aesthetic, with fuzzy scanlines and cool colours. It was probably the first real example in pop culture of a game that questioned the incessant violence in video games. It's big trick of the record scratching as the music is replaced with an off-putting drone and you are forced to trudge through the splayed gores of the people you heartlessly murdered for the fun of it, for the little number above their head that flashes purple and cyan and the feeling of shooting a guy with a shotgun so damn hard he explodes - it's "gimmick" of forcing you to go back through the unfun part of all that, was genius in a way not much else was at the time. Hotline Miami 1 was made in a pre-undertale world, before it was "cool" to ask if all the violence we do in video games desensitizes us to actual, brutal real life killings. It was a smart game for it's time, and even though it's message is slightly redundant now, I think it still holds up well. The central message of this game can be summed up by one line from Richard (who is basically the grim reaper of this game universe, from what I can gather) - Do you like hurting other people?

In real life, the answer to that is, hopefully, no. But hotline miami makes the act of violence feel GOOD. And when you really think about that, is that not sort of terrifying? Even if it is just "pixels on a screen", is it not strange to derive some sort of pleasure out of this?

That was the tone of the game, and what players were supposed to ask themselves by the end of it all. The plot of being an unwilling actor in a fight that suddenly escalates into something greater than it should is mostly unimportant, because that was the core "message" of hotline miami, at the end of it all - nothing about the actual story of the game really mattered. And it was a smart message. I think the only time a game this popular had really asked that sort of question before was just 3 years earlier with the "No Russian" mission in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. But I don't think it does it nearly as well as this game does.

Now, beyond that, the game wouldn't be very effective if it WASN'T fun. And it is FUN. The amount of variation in any given level is incredible. Enemies will have randomly generated weapons, you can choose paths, the order of who you kill might change, and there's tons of depth offered with the mask system. Tony is the very obvious best one, but if you just pick Tony every time, you are going to miss out on a LOT of the experience. Every mask is fun to try and beat a level with. I personally enjoy the masks that increase your walking speed. Any other player's opinions might differ. That's what makes it so fun to try them all out and experiment until you find something you like. The levels this variation is created within are tightly-designed gauntlets that require clever thinking along with tight execution to get a good score. You'll find yourself switching weapons constantly, melee to guns to throwables to guns again back to melee. And all of these playstyles feel INCREDIBLE. Getting a 12x combo with a baseball bat, thoroughly sneaking behind the russian mobsters and narrowly dodging their counterstrikes, shooting them with a double barrel shotgun so hard their entire top half is gone, exploded off of them - It makes unmitigated, horrible violence feel great. And it boosts this satisfaction with a scoring system that'll make you go back to levels over and over again, faster, more well executed, until you get an A+. Realistically, Hotline Miami will take the average player 3-4 hours to beat, maybe 10 with the secret ending, but it has replay value oozing out of every pore that keeps me going back over and over.


I prefer hotline miami 2. I prefer it a LOT. But this game is still near-perfect. Despite Trauma, despite doors, despite shitty AI, despite headache-inducing difficulty, it's some of the most fun i've ever had playing a game, questionable morality of it be damned.

9.5/10. I can't give something a rating that precise on here, but this game is DAMN close to perfect, despite how frustrating it can be. Check it out!