If you want a top-down action game with a Drive-inspired aesthetic, yeah, Hotline Miami is pretty much the only game on the market. It's basically Smash TV from some hippie who really liked Drive, and happened to be proficient in Game Maker. Kinda like the Super Meat Boy of top-down action games, with the same quicksave checkpoint pacing, except not as offensive aesthetically.
It's the same stop-start thing where you die every few seconds - the game has no flow. You can't get into the groove of it. Sometimes when you succeed, it feels like a fluke, not the result of being any good at the game. Maybe you lucked out and the crappy enemy AI did something stupid - who knows, and who cares, because you never have to replay any part of the game once you've beaten it. It's wildly inconsistent - sometimes every dude in the building will rush you if you fire off a shot, and sometimes no one hears it. And you really can't even call it a stealth game. The stealth engine is limited compared even to Metal Gear on the MSX. But overall it's pretty easy - I beat it in three hours.
Relevant part of SriK's Super Meat Boy review:
"If there's almost zero penalty for death, then there's almost zero tension, and therefore almost zero pressure or incentive to succeed other than the visual payoff of getting to see the next level (which in Super Meat Boy's case isn't much of a payoff at all, since its level art is terrible and there are almost no interesting setpieces in the game). I mean, who cares how much you screw up if you can die as many times as you want and be instantly transported 10 seconds back in time, as in a magical savestate? This might not have been such a huge problem if Super Meat Boy's levels were significantly longer, but as it stands each stage averages around 25 seconds, and once a stage is complete there's basically no reason to revisit it."
Every line up there applies to Hotline Miami. It's the same deal here - the stages are so short, and the checkpoints are so close together, death has no weight.
The plot basically comes down to some vague "mysterious" bullshit about how your character is crazy, and killing people is bad. Or is it good? Who knows what the message of Hotline Miami is. It's on the level of an "edgy" short story in a college literary magazine from some dweeb who thinks A Clockwork Orange and Lars von Trier are "sooooo deep".
Yeah, there's a soundtrack, people like it a lot, but it didn't leave an impression on me. I wouldn't call it a plus or a minus.
You ever seen Oboro Muramasa? It might be the prettiest 2D game ever. That should be what you're shooting for, you're making a 2D game these days. Even if you don't have the talent or resources for this kind of thing, even the SFC and Megadrive had a ton of way prettier games. The standard is high, even for retro throwback deals, which this kind of is. I mean, it’d have been ugly if it came out in the late 80s or early 90s too. It has crappy, vaguely 8-bit graphics that you can't even tell what they're supposed to depict. The game is crude looking - it's just up-rezzed, brightly-colored MSpaint splotches. The dialogue scenes are incredibly ugly, with huge-ass, ugly-as-fuck close-ups of faces. I'm sure someone would say, like, "They're supposed to be ugly, man, it represents the ugly nature of violence," before taking another hit off a blunt. And that may be true, but why does that matter? Why are the intentions of some art school drop out dweeb worth considering? Even if he made the damn thing - so what? There are movies "about" violence that are pretty - Drive is filled with gorgeous people - Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks. You want to know the real shit about why Hotline Miami doesn't have good graphics or attractive characters? Because Jonatan Soderstrom can't draw. That's OK, I can't sing - but you don't see me picking up a microphone and wailing into it.
Regarding the premise and setting, sure, it's better than Super Meat Boy, which seems to take place in a sewer (and not a videogame sewer - it's based on a real-life sewer with actual, literal crocks of human fecal matter and used condoms floating by). It's set in Miami in the 80s and you're a guy who kills other guys. Not exactly groundbreaking shit - ever head of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?
Why is it Hotline Miami is praised for its violence? Games like KILLzone 3 and Gears of WAR have you killing hordes of nearly photorealistic humans or humanoids, oftentimes blowing their limbs off or reducing them to piles of gore, with weapons like a triple-barreled sawed-off shotgun or a rifle with a chainsaw bayonet. Dismemberment is one of the main selling points of Dead Space and Metal Gear Rising. And these pixellated squiggles are supposed to make me feel something?
Quoth Supreme Commander icycalm in the forum: "It's funny how, when it's a game by a real developer, violence is bad, but if it's a game by a Western student team, violence is fine and good and awesome and edgy."
THE ONE THING THIS GAME GETS RIGHT: The kills are honestly pretty satisfying, in the same way that killing stuff in the first two Doom games is. Please don't take that as an endorsement of Hotline Miami.
2/5