In-Indie - Hotline Miami 

Well, it’s finally time to dive into the hole. When it comes to indie games, it isn’t long before you find yourself playing a Devolver game. From Ruiner to Red Strings Club to The Swords of Ditto, a completely different game by them. But we’re talking about their most popular game. Starting as a company that worked on Serious Sam games, Devolver managed to really make a name for themselves as the indie publishing company when they released their biggest hit, Hotline Miami. And today is the day we finally talk about this over violent, difficult and insane top down action game

Hotline Miami is set in a very 80s Miami where you play as Jacket. Everything is all neon and synthwave and the music sounds like a club party after the owner just finished enjoying a nice ten pound bag of Tony Montana cocaine. You play as Jacket, a typical man who does an honest work and does it good. And by that, I mean he is a relentless serial killer who murders as many Russian mobsters he can with extreme violence because a voice on the phone told him to. Throughout the game, you will be given very subtle hints to what’s going on in the story, but most of the time, you’ll just be going along with the flow of the game, killing all the enemies in the room before moving on to the next area. At the start of each level, you have a choice of masks to wear. Each one can really help you out in a level if you are getting messed up relentlessly by enemies. Some of my favorites are the ability to kill an enemy with a door, or firearms that are silenced so enemies don’t hear. Once you start, the game already shows it isn’t messing around. You got your fists, and whatever weapon you can pick up from melee weapons to guns. Hit an enemy once and they are more than likely dead. But you die in one hit as well, so make sure they are really dead by smacking them with your weapon or just beating them relentlessly until they drop. For a game with a 16 bit style, it is insanely gory. Heads getting cut off, people’s guts getting shot out. It’s nasty stuff, honestly. But it works well, and the visuals themselves are really nice. Every area and every character just radiates with style and flare from the 1980s. I look at this and my mind immediately goes to games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It just needs some classic 80s music like Hall and Oates and RATT and it’s perfect.

I hear a lot of people talk about the difficulty of the game and how it can be unfair at times. Challenging… yes. Unfair, however, is a bit much. You have the masks that can help, and hell, if you use the one that makes doors lethal, you can wait for an enemy to walk to the door, burst in quickly to kill them with said door and then run out before others see and then continue the process until they die. But most of the time, you’ll have to plan your moves. You can’t run in and expect to win. Enemies are armed and are prepared to kill on sight. You gotta take out everyone quickly and effectively and keep on moving to the next one. No slowing down. That said, the bouncers suck and I hate them. No one should be that strong to melee attacks and move that fast. And the story is something that I was genuinely interested in. When it comes to these sort of fast moving action games, most of the time, the story is second to the gameplay. But Hotline Miami kept both in mind and had similar effort put into both, resulting in an interesting and really messed up story about the psyche and mental state of the individual known as Jacket. Also some shit about a Biker in the epilogue that you can unlock to get the true ending by finding puzzle pieces in the game… but I got other indie games to play, so go and do that if you want.

Hotline Miami was such an addictive title that left me wanting more. And in a rare instance for some indie games, Hotline Miami did get a sequel made that opened up new possibilities and answered a fuck ton of questions. Will I be reviewing Hotline Miami 2 in the future… I dunno. But what I do know is that if you want an addictive and bloody action game that doesn’t treat you like a child and gives you the real kind of challenge you are looking for, Hotline Miami is the game for you.

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