Hotline Miami first came out on PC to rave reviews. Take a trip over to the website and plastered on the homepage are 60 odd reviews with scores between 8/10 and 10/10… not bad.
But the transition to handheld can be a rocky one. How does it stack up? Read on dear reader and find out…
Developer: Dennaton Games
Release Date: Out Now
Format: PC, PS3, PS Vita
Version Tested: PS Vita
Price: £6.49
The plot of Hotline Miami is a tough one to explain because not a lot is really explained…
After a mini tutorial where a trampy looking fella tells you how to kill people, the unnamed protagonist is confronted by three masked men who insinuate that he may have recently been a naughty boy. The action then flashes back to April 3, 1989. After receiving a message on his answering machine about a delivery of cookies, ‘Jacket’ opens a package, but finds not cookies, rather a rubber chicken mask and instructions on to retrieve a briefcase . The objective? Eliminate everyone in the building.
After the first mission, the game carries on in a similar vein; the phone rings, you jump in your car, head over to the location and murder everyone in sight in a variety of brutal and bloodthirsty ways. Cool huh?
With a brilliant soundtrack and retro-cool graphics, Hotline Miami is overflowing with style and it comes across perfectly on the Vita’s wee screen. The controls aren’t bad, not as precise as on PC but perfectly serviceable. Dennaton have managed to avoid chucking in loads of pointless touchy controls to take advantage of all the Vita’s special features. You use the left stick to move, right stick to aim and the shoulder buttons to attack. The only touch controls are a quick tap to target an enemy and finger dragging the screen to look around and scope out your enemies.
In Hotline Miami there are no health packs and there is no hiding around a corner until the edges of your screen go from red to clear; you kill and can be killed in one swing of a bat. In a game where one shot can kill, you’d think stealth and tactical play would be the order of the day. Not so. The game itself, with the pumping music and instant restarts, positively encourage you to fly in with wild abandon, throwing knives and wading in with pool cues and baseball bats in hand.
The best way to score a A+ rating is to kill quickly, and with the largest variety of weapons possible. Make no mistake, this is as violent a game as you will play; you will chop people in half with a samurai sword, crush their heads with your bare hands and club them to death with baseball bats.
It isn’t the longest game in the world. In fact, if you’re half decent at it, you could polish it off in an evening. If you’re a score attack junkie, however, you’ll get more out of it chasing the A+ as well as all the masks and weapons.
Annoying, infuriating, addictive but above all else, bloody good fun; Hotline Miami is a must have for your PS Vita. If you didn’t catch it the first time, there has never been a better opportunity to pick it up and have a go. There is even cross-buy functionality so if you’d rather play on the big screen then you get the PS3 version as an additional bonus!
Bloody good fun!
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