Hotline Miami (2012 Video Game) User Reviews (11)

Miami Violence Never Looked So Good

[mrxelement · 9/10 · 11 January 2014]

Hotline Miami is a insane, bloody, and super violent in the depths of the Miami criminal world. You play as a guy who receives phone-calls every-night making you do the dirty work. While you're doing the dirty work, you get to wear theses different type of mask which have special abilities on how to deal with things. While you're violently killing your foes, you have this amazing soundtrack that goes along perfectly. Though the story is simply weird when you start progressing further like you're entering a bloody nightmare.

Pros: Replay value is high,tons of masks,very violent,levels are challenging,worth the price,amazing soundtrack.

Cons: The levels are a little bit small.

This game is awesome if you want a some quick gruesome fun.

"As Of Lately You've Done Some Terrible Things".

[colorthekid · 8/10 · 3 May 2019]

This game is simple, violent and satisfying. The story is very interesting and it kinda gives me some Nicolas Winding Refn vibes, which I really like. But gosh, this game's soundtrack is on another level.

Amazing.

A good game with some big issues

[roaches_97 · 8/10 · 25 July 2023]

Hotline Miami is ver good. The sprites all look great, the music and atmosphere are great, and the story is really trippy and weird (in a good way). Combat, however, is a double edged sword. Sometimes it's really dynamic and fun, but from my experience, the lock on system is completely broken. In something like Zelda Ocarina of Time, pressing and holding the lock on button will lock on to an enemy, and letting go and holding it again will syphon through different enemies on screen. This works great and I never had any problems with it in that game. In Hotline Miami, pressing the lock on button will result in you locking on to an enemy. When you press the lock on button again, lock on will turn off. To syphon through enemies, you need to use the right control stick, which is incredibly imprecise and often locks on to the wrong enemy. Whenever I killed an enemy that I was locked on to, the game wouldn't auto lock on to the nearest enemy, instead it would auto lock to any random enemy, even offscreen ones. If you kill an enemy that you were locked on to and another starts running toward you, the game will either not lock on to anything or not lock on to the enemy that is running directly at you. I died a lot because of the clunky lock on in this game and it was very frustrating. The game is still very good and is worth playing, but the lock on is so bad.

Possibly The best inde game ever made

[ross-rangers · 10/10 · 1 December 2013]

Hotline Miami is a simple but fun top down shooter game, However it is very hard and frustrating and is massively replay-able. Although this game doesn't have many chapters it will still take 4+ hours to complete. This game has a lot of over the top violence even though it is pix-elated but is very unlikely to offend any body

The plot is simple, a man gets phone calls that instruct him to go places and kill people. These people are later revealed to be the Russian mafia and the people telling you to kill are an independent group of people. The game gets more surreal as the game goes on and it just looks like an acid trip. The music is also very good and i downloaded it after playing the game 10/10

One of the best games I have ever played

[felipe_maldonado_e · 10/10 · 1 December 2014]

Hotline Maimi is a wonderful trip, like a good abstract movie or a bad ass surrealist book.I played the game for the first time on 2012 on my PC, I found it extremely intense and difficult, so after like 8 chapters I quit.This year, I bought myself a brand new PS4, which came with a bonus 10$ PSN card, so I said why not, lets try again this retro indie game,and hell that was a good choice.

The story of the game is a mystery from the begin to the end of the game, because that's the creator's intention, they want you to make the conclusions.

The game-play is mainly a brutal-gory top down massacre, that can be very painful and stressful at first, but with the "try and error" system, you end up controlling the levels in a easier way, but if you want to complete the game at the 100%(as me), you are going to need time and a lot of patience, mainly trying to get the A+ on each level.

The controls, at least on PS4, are very easy to handle, in my opinion, smoothers than the PC ones, although when you start, they take some time to handle, but with time there's no major difficult or struggle.

The graphics have a cool retro style, which ironically, look extremely sweet on HD. Beside this, the game have a very "intense" look, with each stage having a changing color background, which can get some people dizzy or with a headache(luckily that wasn't my case). All the gore of the game, combined with the retro aspect, make the perfect ambient to this non-stop killing festival.

The music is by far the best aspect of the game, having one of the best soundtrack that I've ever listened to, with house and electronic songs that fit absolutely perfect on each chapter, being the perfect addition to this thrilling adventure.

Overall, the game, at least to me, is an indie master piece, being today, one of the best games that the PS4 have to offer.Absolutely recommended if you like the retro style games, the ultra violent games or the good games in general.

10/10

Perfect at what it does, but not for everyone

[CyanideLolipop · 10/10 · 24 March 2014]

Best indie game of all time, as in it does what it sets out to do without flaw. Gameplay is overhead action at its finest, and deceivingly simple, since it only uses 3 buttons. It also has a lot of depth story-wise, with a plot that genuinely surprised me, making it also deceivingly simple in that respect. Even the (spoiler) level Trauma is well done, despite being frequently criticized. It works because of it has purpose, and breaks up the game play slightly. Another thing this game does well, maybe even the best, is the whole descent into madness angle. The only two things I can think of that may turn people off are the difficulty and the gore/presentation. Even though this game is stylized, it is very graphic with its violence. The style, difficulty, craziness narrative, and gore all play into the game's somewhat subtle social commentary on games and the media in general, sort of along the lines of the phenomenal new Spec Ops, but unlike The Line, HM isn't as in your face and obvious about it, despite the components of the theme being right in front of you. And do I seriously need to mention the soundtrack? 10/10, one of the greatest games of all time. My 2012 GOTY.

A near perfect game and a benchmark for the medium as a whole

[ajdemao · 10/10 · 11 July 2020]

One of the most impressive things in a game narrative is to make gameplay an important aspect. Many have tried with various levels of success but most talk about Titanfall 2 or The Last of Us. Hotline Miami does this perfectly. I already did a really long review on my steam so you can check that out if you are so inclined on the account Ranesir, but this game excels in every aspect.

9.5/10 """"A BLOODY GOOD TIME""""

[YoshikageCheems · 10/10 · 9 October 2020]

I was late to the party on this one, the reviews were not lying! Hotline Miami is fast, violent and frustrating fun, you receive a phone call from someone asking you to kill a building full of Russian mobsters, simple as! The combat is gory and fast paced, melee weapons are silent but short ranged, whereas guns are loud and long ranged. It's only £8 on ps4 in the U.K, pick it up, please.

Great game

[quinngrubbs · 10/10 · 4 August 2023]

Hotline Miami is one of my favorite games of all time. Here's some highlights.

Great soundtrack. The ost perfectly captures the surreal aesthetic the game portrays

Cool mask collection. Each one giving you a unique ability like super speed or fists of fury

Interesting story. Jackets journey is one to behold, it's simple yet bizarre with some twists here and there

Large assortments of weapons. Like sledgehammers, katanas, skorpians etc

There's a few downsides though.

Some masks I find to be useless like the George mask.

Melee combat can be broken at time sometimes if you attempt to attack the enemy your weapon will sometimes not do any damage and the end up just killing you.

I still recommend playing it through.

Simple but at times frustrating top down shooter. 62.5+%

[dfle3 · 6/10 · 9 September 2013]

Console: PS3 (via PSN store)

Genre: Top down 3rd person shooter/brawler/puzzle game

Story: You play a man with amnesia who receives messages on his answering machine to accomplish certain jobs. The gameplay makes it seem clear that these messages are coded instructions to kill armed people at certain locations. You have to find out who you are as well as who is behind the phone calls you are receiving. Or maybe you are just insane?

Graphics: My first console was the N64, and the graphics on this predates the image quality on that console, even though it is a new game. So, not sure of the right label for the graphics...8 bit? 16 bit? 32 bit? In other words, it's very primitive looking character models and level models. I think my TV signals that the source is 1080i when I load the game...but the graphics still look the oldest school.

Sound: Old school (think pre PSOne consoles). Alright. Fortunately this is a game where you can turn the sound down and listen to whatever you want without any negative impact on the game play. At times characters do speak in the game but there is no sound in any case and you can read the characters' comments.

Gameplay: Each "mission" starts in your character's lounge room, with a message left on their answering machine. You take your car to the location mentioned then enter a building swarming with thugs with melee weapons or various guns/rifles. Utilising stealth or gung ho tactics you have to kill all the thugs in order to complete the chapter and receive your score. Some buildings only have one level, but others have 2 or 3 floors you have to clear. You can kill thugs whilst unarmed or you can use weapons you knock from the thugs or once you have killed them. Later in the game you will have to deal with attack dogs. Then you get "mini bosses" in chapters, followed by a few chapters of full on boss battles, which are markedly different from the usual gameplay. Earning high scores for chapters sees you receive masks for your character, which you can wear to future missions...they act as power-ups at times. E.g. one mask will allow you to start a chapter with a knife whereas the default starting situation is that your character is unarmed.

Good about the game:

Even though you can die often in a chapter, at times this can be fun, as you try and go about things the right way to finish the chapter. The game therefore has repeat play value.

Bad about the game:

* You can die a lot in some sections of the game and this is really frustrating and exasperating and just kills the fun out of this game. Mainly I have some of those few boss type battles in mind. Even though I did complete the game, for some of those chapters it just felt that I lucked my victory so there is no sense that I came upon a solution to the problem of that boss fight...although with more replays, that lessens. Finding those solutions does seem a matter of luck too.

* If this was a true "pick up and play" game, it would be a lot of fun, but if you find that you must quit the game for whatever reason before you have completed a chapter, then when you resume at some later point, you will have to start the entire chapter again, which can be extremely annoying if just getting to that final level in a chapter meant having to conquer a really tough previous level in that chapter. So, you can find yourself having to spend more time on a chapter than you would if it really was "pick up and play"/"dip in and out".

* It's frustrating that you can die in a chapter due to not seeing a thug because the graphics are so low resolution...they don't stand out from the corpses that you put there previously.

* Combat ideally should have a rhythm to it in this game but early on especially I felt that juggling the combat features was too confusing, even though there aren't a lot of controller buttons to use...e.g. locking on to a thug to take them out and then locking onto another thug to repeat the process...once you get a few thugs racing towards you about to gank you, it's easy to forget what button to press to do such and such.

* Probably the biggest negative for me is that is one of those games that you will have to go on to You Tube or on to Forums in order to finish the game 'properly'/solve the Puzzle that the game offers. I replayed the game equipped with the mask for revealing Secrets (presumably which help you solve the Puzzle which allows you to get a score in the final chapter of the game proper (which I have not yet done)...yet have not found all the pieces to the Wheel Of Fortune like letters you need to presumably solve that puzzle. It's probably the low resolution graphics here again...Puzzle pieces not standing out from the background or from other non-Puzzle pieces. Once you need to You Tube or look up answers to complete the game, that becomes a big negative for me...I have a life you know! My toenails aren't going to cut themselves!

General observations:

This game reminded me of the Metal Gear Solid: Virtual Missions bonus disc for the PSOne, which I bought when I was playing the PS2. However, it's more complex and complicated than that game...which came across as a negative point for me.

Better than most titles in 2023

[oneballiousempire · 10/10 · 25 October 2023]

This game is an action packed masterpiece, and you should play it even today. Its a adrenalin and drug filled adventure and the 2d pixel art looks amazing even to this day. When the level is over and the music stops you just walk around thinking what just happened and how much suffering you did, Hotline Miami does something unique by making the violence so over the top that you get used to it your do the cycle and see all the pain you do as normal now.

Oh boy and the story Is amazing and hotline Miami 2 you should play as well to understand the whole story.

Overall play hotline Miami its a great game and you should play :)