Pretty much a perfect game. I can pinpoint a few lows throughout my playthrough, but they were incredibly small nitpicks, while the highs made me feel like I was experiencing the best piece of art I have ever experienced and WILL ever experienced.

If you don't play this game you're missing out. It's incredible. Kojima predicts many of the pitfalls of the modern digital era, and that 42 minute sequence takes place only after a game with graphics that are GORGEOUS for their period, innovative stealth gameplay that matches that of modern stealth games, an incredible soundtrack, and incredible story. It is the best game i've ever played. Though, that is until I play snake eater, supposedly.

One of the best damn games i've ever played. Story is incredible - you get diversed in the characters, and it's great at making you feel things in a way that not many games can. Graphics and voice acting are pretty much as good as it gets on the PS1. The gameplay is for the most part incredible... with some very minor issues.

The thing that comes to mind is backtracking. There is some really bad backtracking 3 times (4 if you get the optional body armor which, you are purposefully crippling yourself if you dont get). The sniper rifle backtrack and second pal key backtrack are by FAR the most egregious, with both taking at least 20 minutes in total, from my experience. But beyond those gripes? You'll find a tightly designed stealth game with incredible bosses and great guns.

It's one of, if not the best games i've ever played. If you like video games, play metal gear solid.

Can't wait for the second game. Heard that that ones somehow even better.

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!

Oh MAN, do I not like this game. It's not out of a lack of effort on Nintendo's end. It's not offensively unoriginal like the New Super Mario Bros. series. It's not grossly difficult like Sunshine. Those are the only 2 praises I can give this game.

I think this game really, truly got ruined for me when I tried to 100% it. I beat the Darker Side of the moon, and it was like all joy of the game had instantly got sucked out. Suddenly, the game went from a joyous romp through some of the coolest levels Mario has seen yet, with eye-catching, color-popped visuals and a focus on pure spectacle and grandeur, to a tawdry fetch quest, jam packed with forgettable moon after forgettable moon, that after my 610th moon made me go, "What the fuck am I doing with my life, man?"

There is too many moons. This suffers from the same problem BotW had, which is what I like to call the "Skittles Game" problem. This game is basically just a man in a parking lot, opening a pack of 836 skittles, shaking them everywhere so they get scattered all across the parking lot, and asking you to get 124 skittles to get to the final boss, 500 skittles to get the true ending, and 836 skittles to get the true TRUE ending. I don't want to keep collecting the FUCKING SKITTLES. I miss when a star felt like an actual challenge to get and not just a meaningless little treat you get for ANYTHING, comparable to potty training a damn toddler by feeding it a single M&M when it sits on the toilet. It is ludicrous how much content there is in this game, and more importantly, how not an ounce of it is difficult. It is one of the easiest games i've ever played, as a matter of fact. Any ounce of difficult I got out of this game was me mistaking frustration for difficulty or challenge, because it is INSULTINGLY easy, even for the most difficult moons in the game.

Lets see what it gets right:
Movement (Incredible movement! Probably the best mario's controlled in years, i'd say! Very very good job, and one of the only saving graces of this game! I do have a few minor gripes though, specifically with mario's walljump, which is totally pathetic.)
Colour and grandiose (Lost Kingdom, Metro Kingdom and Cap Kingdom in specific are totally gorgeous and unforgettable worlds. I can see why this game was so positively percieved specifically at launch - it was because no one had gotten far enough into the game to see the absolute monotony of playing through this game after your first playthrough.)
Music (A lot of good songs on here! A lot of very, very, very good songs on here!)

If these were enough to make a game a perfect 10/10, then this game would, in fact, be a 10/10 for me. But as it is right now, when I play this game, all I can see is something that, much like Breath of the Wild, is a totally visually gorgeous adventure that is jam packed with CONTENT while not having much substance. When you make a game as large as this one, you would hope that like, 75% of the moons arent totally forgettable and boring, but guess what? They are!

I don't know. Just play Galaxy 1 and 2 or 64 instead. You'll get a much tighter, clean adventure, full with actual substance and challenging yet fun platforming. This game, by comparison, offers me zero reason to play ever again. Maybe if I get nostalgic for it in the far future.

5/10. Incredibly average. Incredibly overhyped.

By far one of the best, if not the best game i've ever played. It feels like almost every story beat does something new and interesting that no piece of media before or since has ever done for me. This game has a lot to say, and people take that as it being loose and disconnected.

Hotline Miami 2 is a VERY good commentary on a lot of things. Hyperpatriotism and white nationalism, fans of the original game, the military industrial complex, addiction, and capitalism are just a few of the topics this game tackles, and I think it does all of them excellently, even if it does sometimes struggle to connect these topics. Each individual story beat is so incredibly interesting to me, and they all combine up to create what I can only say is the most interesting and poignant story I have ever seen told in any game before. I got attached to every character emotionally in SOME significant way, a goal the game goes for and succeeds at wonderfully.

Beyond the absolutely brilliant story (which I have seen some lambaste before), I think this game also succeeds in every other aspect. The soundtrack for this game is just incredible. From the schizophrenic, nervous vibe of Run by iamthekidyouknowwhatimean, to the thrill and excitement of Roller Mobster by Carpenter Brut, to the sobering vibe of Untitled by The Green Kingdom, I can't think of a single bad song on here. Every composer for this game did absolutely brilliantly. It all builds up to the game's ending song, You Are the Blood by The Castanets. What a fitting song for such an ending. No spoilers.

The gameplay is seemingly very controversial within online spaces, with some thinking the gameplay is completely unfair and unfun, almost gameruiningly so in comparison to hotline miami 1's. I am not one of those people. Hotline Miami 2's gameplay is challenging, and thought-provoking, but clearing rooms feels absolutely incredible and exhilirating in a way I can't truly describe. This game makes you FEEL smart for solving each room. It's a perfect mix between tight execution and remembering what goon is where, and which has what. At the end of it all, you're left with a feeling of triumph. The controls feel much more precise and careful than those of Hotline Miami 1's, and the mask / character gimmicks are incredibly fun, ranging from controlling 2 characters at once with the twins, Alex and Ash, to playing as a pacifistic man who can render enemies unconcious and rack up combos by disassembling guns. Or, you can simply say fuck that and play the game normally by going into his rage mode. It is worth noting that this game IS absurdly difficult, but never to a point where it made me genuinely consider putting it down for good. It also uses this difficulty to deliver a message on multiple occassions.

I feel like hotline miami 2 use's its rather limited visual style to deliver a game that looks very good, with some of the set pieces and effects in this game looking genuinely incredible, and the character art seeming to have vastly improved from the weird, offputting character art of the first game.


In total, this game is absolutely incredible. I don't regret playing a second of it. It's a totally unforgettable experience that I don't really think will ever be matched.

10/10.

A romp through the gorgeous Hyrule that ultimately falls short due to a variety of problems. The worst of the 3d zeldas i've played through (Ocarina of Time, Breath of the Wild and Majora's Mask). "A ridiculous over-feeding of content that really was not necessary" is the best way to summize how I feel about this. If you trim the fat of this game, which is boring shrines and an overly-large world map that doesn't reward you nearly as often as people say it does, you're left with a Zelda game with 4 boring dungeons, an awesome final dungeon, unmemorable characters, frustrating mechanics, slippery controls, and a great way to spend 80 hours of your life.

Positives:
Beautiful world with a gorgeous aesthetic
Great final dungeon
Great character design from a visual point of view
Engaging exploration
Loaded with fanservice to past games
Great final dungeon

Cons:
Horrible progression that starts slow and ends almost completely stagnant
Options that the game forces you to use but doesn't make fun to use in the slightest
Awful enemy variation
Horrible dungeons
Shrines
Light music
Repetitive use of the ugliest aesthetic in the game (Shrines, Divine Beasts)
Forgettable story and character writing that leaves much to be desired
Too much content (120 shrines, 800 korok seeds) that the game almost requires you to get at least a decent chunk of if you want to have a good player experience
Frustrating mechanics (Weapon durability is the main one here)
Slippery controls that dont feel entirely accurate at times
Performance hitches
Unsatisfying combat if you aren't fully in touch with the game's systems
4 bosses that all suck


I'm overall just disappointed with this game. Critics and fans alike constantly panegyrize that it's a masterpiece and the best game on the switch, but I did not get that experience from it. Every time I replay breath of the wild, I like it less. It has the most content, and the least substance out of every Zelda game, at least in my personal experience.

I hope TOTK is better when I play it.

3/10.