Hotline Miami is an indie game from 2012 made by Dennaton games, which is based in Russia. It's known for its difficult, fast-paced gameplay and having a killer soundtrack. The devs loved this game so much, that they released a patch for the PIRATED version of Hotline Miami. I bought this game on sale along with Hotline Miami 2 and here's my opinion on it.
Graphics - 7: Yes, I know it's a purposely retro game, and thus has 16-ish bit graphics.But sometimes it isn't the cleanest, and they can get in the way sometimes. If you kill multiple enemies at once, you could have missed on, and they would be stunned instead of killed. Then, they'd rise up and sneakily kill you. But other than that, it looks pretty good. The Disco level, in particular is one of the better looking levels (because of all the colors).
Sound - 10: If I could give this a higher grade, I would. The soundtrack for Hotline Miami is infamous for being extremely good, and is one of the main reasons to keep going after you keep dying every few seconds. Some of the best tracks for me are:
Hydrogen - M.O.O.N Miami - Jasper Byrne
Paris - M.O.O.N Miami Disco - Perturbator
Inner Animal - Scattle Electric Dreams - Perturbator
There's other good tracks, just you have to find them yourself! Some of the songs (in particular Scattle's and possibly Perturbator's Miami Disco) were made directly for Hotline Miami, with Scattle releasing all of his HLM songs as an EP and Perturbator making 4 other songs to go with Miami Disco in an EP. Strangely enough, one of the tracks off of that EP got into Hotline Miami 2.
Addictiveness - 6: Given you are going to die frequently, it has to have some sort of addictiveness. Again, the fantastic soundtrack really help with that, and having a simple keypress to restart also makes it easier to continue.
Story - 3: Hotline Miami doesn't have much of a story unless you go searching for it. But its basically, some guy (the player character, also known as Jacket) is receiving phone calls from 50 blessings to go out and kill some people from the Russian mafia. Hotline Miami 2 gives more details about what happened, but this is a review for Hotline Miami, not Hotline Miami 2.
Depth - 4: Besides the hidden letters in the levels to get a secret ending, there's also finding the different masks hidden in the levels, or ones gotten after a certain chapter. These masks can heighten (or hinder) Jacket's killing abilities. There's a tiger mask that lets you have killing punches, a pig mask that drops more guns, a mole mask that makes everything darker, a horse mask that gives you lethal doors, a unicorn mask that gives you silent gunshots, a frog mask that extends the combo window, a bat mask that reverses the controls, and even a fish mask, aptly named Phil, that translates the game's text to french. The masks add some depth and challenge to the game, but overall the best mask to me is Tony the tiger's mask. Lethal punches, so I don't have to wield anything to kill people? Sweet. Too bad he sucks in Hotline Miami 2.
Difficulty - 9: This game is pretty hard. You are going to die a lot. You die in one hit, you can accidentally get the entire floor on your butt,
and enemies can swarm you with guns. But yet, it is forgiving, as the levels aren't THAT big or long if you don't die and go at a decent pace. Overall, if you are new to Hotline Miami, you should be fine with its difficulty curve.
Conclusion: Should you buy this game? Yes. When it's on sale? Heck yeah. It'll only be like 3 bucks at that point, and its a worthwhile 3 bucks. If you like the soundtrack, then you can buy that, too. The profits from the soundtrack go directly to the artists, or you can go to their bandcamp pages and buy from there for other soundtracks.
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