Alright, ladies and gents, today we're taking a break from my various barely-coherent rants about RPGs, and instead taking a look at a game that takes the concept of coherency and beats it over the head with a lead pipe. It's a game I've been utterly hooked on, since a very good friend introduced me to it, and I want to take an entire page of my beautiful blog to pimp it out, as it deserves all the praise it gets. So, with that in mind, let's review Hotline Miami.
Gameplay:
The first thing you'll notice about this game, and notice almost immediately, is that it is bloody difficult. One shot of anything, from a swing of a meat cleaver, to a dog deciding your neck looks particularly delicious today, to a shotgun blast to the face, will end you. The idea of the game is, bizarrely enough, realism, and normal people just can't stand up to a hail of bullets the way Gears of War or Call of Duty humans do. The thing is, this goes both ways. Your enemies are human and extremely fragile, and even boss fights can soon be decorating the floor with a hint of their brains if you manage a lucky swing with a pipe. This actually creates a very, very tense atmosphere. The game is utterly, brutally unforgiving, but makes you feel absolutely invulnerable as you slice the jugular veins of hordes of enemies and attack dogs, but at the same time, very, very breakable, and when you finish a level, the resulting redecoration of the walls in the blood and intestines of your enemies gives a very, very satisfying feel, especially if you had to try the level over and over again. This brings me to the second gameplay mechanic. If you die (and you will die, a LOT), you respawn at the start of the level, with all your previously killed enemies alive. This gives the game a very analytical and strategic feel, as you can just keep going through the same sequence of events until you manage to re-purpose every enemy's guts as wallpaper, or decide to try something completely new. The game doesn't really punish you for this, allowing you to take vastly different approaches to levels in a style that reminds me, confusingly enough, of Deus Ex. It also rewards recklessness, allowing you to chain together kills to form combos for more points. The tactical elements of the game allows you to almost reach a meditative state, a sort of 'murder zen' if you will. Stuff happens almost to quickly for your conscious mind to react, and that split second you're trying to think of what to do is the second someone shoots you in the face. The best way to play this game is in a kind of calm, meditative serenity, coldly analyzing one's surroundings and reacting appropriately, almost on instinct, which, as we'll touch on in the theme and storyline, fits disturbingly well.
Storyline/Theme:
Amazingly, a game that on the surface looks incredibly shallow, has quite an interesting storyling, one that has intrigued me endlessly. So, you're an unnamed hitman, with a creepy fetish for plastic animal masks, who gets mysterious messages on his answering machine, telling him to go kill mobsters. He does this without any sort of question or quandary. Now, this might seem like the typical shallow plot of a violent shooter, but the game really starts taking a psychological bent when it starts examining the kind of person who would be the protagonist of a mindless shooter, and what that would do to a person's mind. The main character already seems pretty damn unhinged.....the background and text boxes have this odd, psychedelic effect, where the colors keep swirling and changing, and the text rocks nauseatingly back and forth. This only increases as the game goes on, and soon, the protagonist is having hallucinations of dead bodies speaking to him and ATM's asking him to feed them a stray cat. It's actually quite a good breakdown of what a person in that situation would have to be like, a totally insane psychopath, who goes on killing sprees because random voice messages on his answering machine tell him to. It gets to the point where you start to consider just how deranged your actions are, but by that point, it's already too late. Even the plot and the ultimate twist, is deranged even by the standards of this story, and really makes you wonder how much is real and how much is just in the main character's head.
Design
Now, this is where the game excels. It tries to capture this retro, 80's style, neo-noir feel, and manages to do it very well. The soundtrack is entirely acid-synth, and the colors and atmosphere just add to the creepily psychedelic feel of a very American mental breakdown. The brutality of the game is disturbing even by the standards of the most modern games, and that's something to be said. This is a game that lets you beat a mobster's head in with a lead pipe and watch his brains fly everywhere. It's a game that let's you kick your enemy's skulls until they cave in, slit their throats, chop them in half with machetes, and even murder them with power-drills, and all of it is rendered it loving, 8-bit detail. Now, as far as gore goes, I'm pretty used to this stuff, as you can tell by my other blog posts, so it didn't really bother me, but I began to think that it stood for something more than just a marketing gimmick. The sheer, utter brutality of the game allows the players to realize exactly what they've done, especially when all the enemies are dead and the pounding synth track turns into a morose, dour requiem, that really makes you feel the gravity of the situation. It's an almost perfect deconstruction of action games, that doesn't come across as too preachy or too silly. Almost everything is inferred, and shown through creepy hallucinations and symbolism.
Overall
Overall, Hotline Miami is an excellent example of a video game that sets out to do something, then does it with no apology or compromise. It's a very good example of games as art, as despite the gore and retro graphics, it aims to tell a complicated story, as well as make the player think, which is much more than can be said for whatever dross Activision is shitting out these days.
5/5
- Kephn
No comments:
Post a Comment