Hotline Miami review

[Golgo]

Given up hope on Retro City Rampage?

Where is it? PSN lol, etc.

[Family Fry]

Dev said Retro City Rampage would be on PSN EU by end of October, man that dev won't know what's hit him.
I've heard this before about Closure and Dyad, one got cancelled and the other is STILL not out WTF

[MisterBubbles]

Any word on the patch, or when its due?

[MisterBubbles]

I thought you might buy a US PSN Dog to buy it.

[Sketcz]

EDIT:
Fixed.

Turns out a driver problem.

[MisterBubbles]

Is it fixed and there's a patch incoming Sketcz?

[Sketcz]

No, I just hadn't updated my nvidia drivers since 2010. I did so and that fixed it. Works fine now, only freezing up occasionally.

Can't say I'm enjoying it. Actually, it could be the worst game I've played in a while. It's too random. WAY too random. I have to replay each level about 50 times to complete it, and each time everything behaves differently.

I had to replay Darks Souls a lot, but each time the enemies behaved precisely the same. I hate emergent gameplay/dynamic AI I've discovered. If I do something a second time, I expect things to play out the same as before, not entirely differently.

This means there is ZERO need to vary what I do. Because if I do the same thing, eventually it might work. And if often does. When I try to vary my actions, I die anyway. It's the gaming equivalent of a roulette wheel.

My score: 1/10

[chopemon]

But that's the joy. You can't memorise it so you go in roughly knowing where the enemies are and then you have to freestyle it LIKE A BOSS.

Shame you aren't enjoying it

[Family Fry]

LIKE A BOUSE!
Always thought the joy with Miami was the fast and furious death,restart, death combo.
Kick a door down knife a guy then get shotguned in the face, restart with a different approach.
Doing all this whilst some kick ass tunes play. Was never going to be everyones cup of tea though but it has reviewed pretty well all round.

[Sketcz]

Unpredictability is fine, if you're given leeway to screw up and recover. Hotline Miami requires perfection to succeed. Which coupled with the randomness makes it frustrating. It's an odd design choice - on the one hand the crap can hit the fan because you can't predict anything, but on the other if you slip up even slightly it's game over. It never felt like I succeeded due to skill or knowledge. It always felt like luck.

It's also a bit like a roguelike, and I don't like roguelikes.

Love the art style and music though. Probably the main reason I pressed on.

Finished it. Not sure I can be bothered getting the little items to unlock the true ending. Might just Youtube it.

[EvilBoris]

I think the NPCs do react to you in a way that is possible to replicate, but they are incredibly sensitive to time and player position.

I've been experimenting and I've made the same thing happen like 10 times in a row, but deviate off the path by a pixel or 3 and the enemy reacted in a different way.

I'd prefer it to be a little more predictable, I like the rinse and repeat frustation of things like Meatboy or Call of Duty.

[Synthesthesia]

I like the fact that it isn't predictable. I fail to see how that is anything other than a good thing, especially for replayability. I've never once been frustrated by the varying AI- it's one of the things I love about the game.

I still haven't finished it yet, was messing around with big screen mode in steam earlier on so used my 360 controller to play a level. Is it possible to look ahead on the controller like it is on the keyboard? Seems like a pretty big oversight if you can't but I couldn't figure out how to do it with just some random button presses.

[Sketcz]

I like the fact that it isn't predictable. I fail to see how that is anything other than a good thing, especially for replayability. I've never once been frustrated by the varying AI- it's one of the things I love about the game.

Unpredictability needs a degree of leeway to work. In Hotline Miami you have one shot at success, and you need to be flawless. The two are not compatible. A game like Demon's/Dark Souls requires flawless action, and messing leads to a sudden death, but the game is built like a Swiss watch. Everything is predictable.

Compare against something like... MGS3 or 4? The soldiers' behaviour can vary sometimes. There's some unpredictability. But when the crap hits the fan, you lose some energy and you can recover. As the game adapts and does something unexpected, the player is required to improvise. There is room for error. There are other games like, fighters, FPS titles, and so on. In all of them, the entire joy of the unpredictability is the ability to encounter it, recover, improvise and succeed.

The intimate lover of unpredictable mechanics is improvisation. The two need to be together. Hotline Miami puts a drill through the eye socket of improvisation, demanding the player do it right first time. No improvisation. No recovery. First time only or GTFO. To do something right in one take you need a plan. But to have a plan you need predictability, a rigid framework around which to drape your intentions so that each action can play its part like a cog in a Swiss Watch.

All of this is intensified by the randomisation of weapons. One time a guy has a shotgun, then a club, then a knife, then a machine gun. How can I make plans to attack him when it's always different. The best strategy I found was to intentionally die and keep replaying until he started with just a basic melee weapon. How is this good design? It's encouraging players to abuse a random number generator.

I'd say this entire thing is actually a good example for game design classes. Because I think the underlying, fundamental design of HM is shockingly broken. It's not even broken, it just doesn't function. It's the game equivalent of waterproof soap, or a solar powered torch. If you are going to have dynamic AI and emergent gameplay, which fosters moments of failure or a plan going awry, then there needs to be leeway for the player to recover and improvise. If you're going to have 1-hit kills and instant game over, then your game system must be like clockwork so the player can learn it and improve.

Right now I can neither improvise, nor learn, and so really what is the ****ing point of playing? It's just random luck. I'll be honest I wasn't even paying attention in the last few levels, because there was no point. It's why I don't enjoy randomised gambling in real life (bar the odd lotto ticket), because I have no control over it - I hate roulette and slot machines.

They say one definition of insanity is: repeating the same action while expecting different results.

In the 50+ playthroughs of a single level, repeating the same action always produced different results. Made worse by the random weapons system. Eventually the same action let me win. It's mind-boggingly stupid. Of course I tried different approaches, but they too led to failure, sometimes even more quickly.

Hotline Miami is easily demonstrable as one of the worst designed games I have ever played in my life. I'm almost lost for words trying to articulate this. It is irredeemably bad. Broken. Wonky. Unbalanced. Illogical. Just plain stupid. I mean how did anyone see or play and not think: this is the dumbest **** I've ever played.

Yet the world loves it. Their website lists 65 positive critic reviews. I'm lost for words. I will never trust another opinion again. I had more fun playing infamously bad examples of kusoge than I did this wretched garbage.

[chopemon]

100% disagree. I felt like I learned the game's systems and completed parts of levels by memorisation and parts by improvisation. I distinctly remember several occasions of enemies not being where they were before/I expected them to be and made it through by the skin of my teeth with a good improvised weapon throw or door slam. It's true you only get one chance to improvise before you die but I found that added delightful tension to it. Rather than brute forcing the randomisation as you did, I found I ran into the levels having some idea of what was coming and then freestyling the rest. Sometimes it would work, sometimes I would get minced but each time was wonderfully tense and the feeling of everything coming together was exquisite.

The game is only partially about planning. You will die and repeat and rather than just learning exact same level layout, you learn how to react to things randomly changing. You learn how to deal with the AI states, what to do with each weapon and mask. I do think it was a shame you couldn't pick a new mask each time you died.

Each to his own though. The game design isn't broken but it isn't to everyone's tastes.

[Sketcz]

I bow to your clearly superior gaming skill. Obviously I'm not as flexible as I need to be. I like unpredictability (big fan of obscure retro FPS Immercenary), but when I'm punished for experimenting by sudden deaths I invariably turn to brute forcing my way through, since that's the only thing that yielded success in a timely fashion for me.

I chose the dog mask always, to remove the need to deal with them (when they were in a level). It's funny, because I've been enjoying a lot of NES games recently, which are one-hit kill affairs, but always in the same places.

Part of my disappointment is that this is almost my kind of game. Love the distorted graphics with pixel artefacts, visual style and audio. The upper floor of the cop station near the end almost reached a level of true excellence for me - but that was because most of the cops were locked in place. Either in the central room, of in surrounding rooms. They didn't budge when I started firing, since the chief told them: stay in position, do it by the book.

Probably the only level I really, really liked. It became more of a puzzle game. I noted where each cop was, locked on from a distance, and then popped out of a door to take them down, one by one, in an almost rhythmic but carefully orchestrated fashion.

That's when the game worked best. By locking on, your character will always face the NPC, allowing to pop out of hidey holes and snipe from a distance. Run in guns blazing and they cut you down, but by planning things you could take them all out without trouble.

I would have liked to see an entire game based around the design for the top floor of the cop station.

Knowing my luck, I bet that's the level everyone else disliked.