Hotline Miami was released in october of 2012 by swedish indie developer house Dennaton Games. It had little pre-release advertising, so the first to play it must have been quite suprised at the gameplay. Hotline Miami has been praised by numerous gaming sites. But enough of what they think, let's see what i think about the game!

Story: 9/10
It's the third of april, 1989. A silent protagonist, who many refer to as "jacket", wakes up in his apartment and listens to a cryptic message on his phone telling him to look outside his door. There he finds a package, and in it, an address with orders to drop off a briefcase there, along with a rooster mask. What jacket is actually tasked with doing is going to the address and killing everyone there, including a man with a briefcase, and dropping it off in the side alley, all while donning a mask. After completing this first task, Jacket is sent more cryptic messages, all telling him to head to a specified address and killing everyone there, orders which he continues to blindly obey. Along the way, jacket finds more masks which give him special powers, all will more parts of the plot begin to unravel, and jacket finds out there may be more people than just himself involved.

I give the story a 9 out of 10. It's certainly interesting, and There are quite a few twists in this story, none of which can be easilly predicted, even if you're a seasoned gamer. My only problem is that Jacket does esentially the same thing in every level. Hear the message, go to adress, kill everyone, leave. Having some levels where you do different things would have been great.

Graphics: 8/10
The game is displayed from a top-down perspective, so it's easier to admire the effort that went into the textures. Obviously nodding to 1980s-early 90s graphics, everything looks like pixels, but in a good way. Even the most mundane things like couches, beds, and chairs all look like a crazy amount of effort went into them to make them look good, while still keeping that 8-bit feeling. As for the enemies, however, you don't ever see much of them because you either only see the top of their heads, or their corpses, with their brains splattered on the wall. A big problem i have is that the graphics can suddenly glitch out, leaving you in invisible world.

I give the graphics a 8 out of 10. A lot of good stuff can be said about the grahics, but the top-down perspective does come at the cost of seeing the enemies in full detail. Something that could definatly be fixed is the invisible-world glitch, which basically leaves me unable to play the game.

Sound: 9/10
If there's one thing this game does darn near-perfect, it's the sound. Even though it's all 8-bit, that didn't stop the numerous musicians who contributed to this game from cramming in as much variety, and sheer awesomeness in there as possible. The song could sound depressed or bouncy, angry or calm, and it'd still be a perfect tune for bashing in peoples faces. There's just one problem, however. The sound effects are not only generic (though generic sound effects are to be expected from an 8-bit game), but annoying. The game uses the same sound effect for bullets, and since you'll be staring down the barrel of a gun for quite a bit of the game, soon you're gonna want to start turning the effects off. Unfortunatly, that's not really possible because a gunshot is probably going to be the only way to hear an enemy coming for you.

I give the sound a 9 out of 10. While the songs are like perfect odes to bashing someones skull in, the sound effects are like odes to skinning your cat. It's really unfortunate how you'll have to just live through these noises.

Difficulty: 9/10
You die in one hit. That's all it takes to kill you. One blow with any weapon, and Jacket's brains will literally explode. As such, you MUST master either the art of sneaking up on the enemy and killing him from behind, or the art of running into an enemy, weapons flying, and hopeing you kill him before he kills you. Mastering either one isn't easy, because enemies almost always occur either in bunches, or slightly spread out so if you kill one guy, another will always be coming out of his cycle just in time to kill you. Thanfully, you have infinite lives, a huge variety of melee weapons and firears, and the OHKO rule also applies to enemies.

I give the difficulty a 9 out of 10. You die in one hit, and the enemies have a tendency to lay in the most annoying places possible. Thankfully, the game give you quite a bit respite to ease this challenge, but it dosen't help that much in the long run.

Addictiveness: 10/10
This game is just flat out fun. Murdering other people whilst turning their brains into a mush is something that, though usually seen as immoral, is something that we usually want to do to our enemies. This game is like a simulator of that, only with more entertaining weapons. It's made even more fun by the variety of masks available. With these masks, you can now do things like murder with doors, murder with a free knife, and even murder with, yes, a drill. It's also fun to try to get A+ on all the levels. Your grade increases with the more enemies you kill, the more combos, and your efficency at murdering.

Depth: 3/10
There are 27 masks you can collect throughout the game. They give you certain abilities or weapons, like the ability to kill with doors, a free assault rifle, or the dream of all gamers, translation of all text into french. You can obtain these masks either by finding them in certain stages, or getting a high enough scores. As for the stages, there are 20 of 'em. You can play 15 as jacket and 5 as Biker, a boss encountered in jackets story. Playing as Biker reveals many aspects of the story. Besides that, there's not much to talk about.

Overall: 8.5/10
Hotline Miami is a solid game that's fun, and has great music and graphics, along with an interesting story. However, it has a few too many problems that need ironing out.

Nice review! It was well written and well laid out. You can tell you worked hard on this.

As far as the game goes, I'm excited to play through it. I bought it on steam during the Holiday Sale, but I've yet to delve into it.

I'll let you know what I think once I've played it for awhile!

Wow. Very good. What an awesome review!

This kind of review is pulling  me and
dragged  me along to play this online game.

I can't wait to play that game!!!

Me, Absolutely Crazy and Maniac.

Awesome review! Decent amount of detail and interesting to read. I may play this game sometime. I definitely look forward to your future reviews man!

Wow very great review! I could also tell that you put a lot of work and time into this. I was at the edge of my seat reading it and it makes me want to play this game now. Keep up the awesome reviews!