Sounds of the 80s oozed out of my Playstation Vita. Really, it was just bad techno music, but it fit perfectly with the neon colors painted on the screen. I quickly scanned my surroundings by dragging a finger across the touch screen, trying to plan my route. There was one henchmen using a urinal and one standing guard outside that room. I kicked in the first door and cracked the poor man peeing in the head with a bat, grabbed his shotgun, and went through the next door. Apparently, I didn’t pay attention because after I shot the guard outside, an armed mobster (or whatever they are) pelted me with an assault rifle. I simply sighed and hit “x” to restart the section.
Hotline Miami made a big splash on the PC side of gaming last year, and I had multiple people tell me I needed to try it. I did, but without a controller and I found the mouse and keyboard controls to be uncomfortable (especially on a laptop). So Hotline Miami sat in my Steam library, never to be touched again.
Fast forward a half-year or so later, and the indie charmer makes its way to Playstation 3 and Vita. It’s rather hard to pass up a game so highly-regarded, especially when I had been itching for a Vita game to play.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the story. Being a child of the 80s, and therefore being someone this game is clearly geared towards, one would think I would be able to nod my head in understanding as things unfolded on the small screen in my hands. Instead, trying to figure out what was going on just confused me and made me less interested in the game. I found more enjoyment by ignoring the strange phone calls that set up each stage and the short scenes after the stages that simply made no sense to me at all. The stages themselves, as well as the inherent difficulty within, are really what Hotline Miami is about.
Getting into the game is rather easy, as the first stage is pretty simple to plow (or shoot/smash, rather) through. Hotline does a good job of showing you the basics: “hit people with R1, finish them with X, and pick up/throw weapons with L1.” That pretty much sums up the game’s controls, though the Vita exchanges “hold R2 to target an enemy and hold L2 to look ahead” with touch controls. These touch controls feel more natural and made me prefer the Vita version.
While getting into the game is easy, actually getting through stages ramps up in difficulty very quickly and aggressively. More than once, I almost shut the game off after trying to clear a section dozens of times. That’s not a typo either, some sections took me a lot of tries to continue. At times it was like the game was on repeat. Getting the timing right between kills took a certain finesse that was difficult to achieve. Sometimes it was the smallest change in my approach that left a door open for victory, a door I only found after a lot of trial and error. I still vividly remember the start of one of the stages. I tried to take out the guard coming from a restroom first, but somehow managed to die each time shortly afterwards. I was living the movie Groundhog Day, and had to play that level so many times that those pixels have frozen into my brain forever. The real kicker was when I finally made it through a long string of taking out bad guys, I had scanned ahead to see what was going on at the end of the segment and wasn’t paying attention to the actual level itself. I saw the guy sitting on the couch, but failed to realize that the only thing between us was some glass walls. I’m pretty positive that when I got shot through the glass that I yelled some profanities and turned my Vita off.
The beauty about Hotline Miami, though, is that I could scream at the Vita and shout that “this is impossible!!” but still know that it was my fault, and how I was playing the game that resulted in my death. Don’t get me wrong, I cussed and murmured half of the time I was playing. But each time I tweaked my advancement through the stage and how I approached things, I either got a little further or saw an opening I didn’t see before. It’s a very strategic, albeit frantic, experience that led to an exhilarating feeling when I finished a level.
The console version was more comfortable to play than its mouse and keyboard counterpart but still took a little bit of getting used to. Manipulating the triggers to scan the surroundings, target a foe, and then executing them took more thought than it did on the Vita, which was simply more intuitive by means of using the touch screen to look around past the initial line of sight.
After playing Hotline Miami on PC, then Playstation 3, and then the Vita, it was the Vita version that felt most natural. The frustrating difficulty led to more short-burst gaming sessions, so it was easy to stop playing after a level, and go about doing something else. It was nice to finally experience what all the rage was about last year. Clearly, someone asked “where’s the beef” on the Vita, to which Dennaton Games presented Hotline Miami.
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