OTXO has joined the exclusive camp of roguelikes alongside Enter the Gungeon for me as something I ultimately enjoyed and will likely play on and off, but may never finish. Part of that comes down to the fact that I suck at both, but also cause both have some similar issues that hold me back from getting addicted to them.

In the case of OTXO, its moment-to-moment gameplay is pure perfection. Its weapons are sleek and feel weighty, with a welcome punch to each shot hitting their target. Its movement is also fluid, thanks in part to a well done slowdown mechanic. When you're in the thick of it and clearing room after room, only to barely clear a level with one HP, it's exhilarating.

It's the reason I put around 10 hours or so into it in the first place despite the lack of that "one more run" feeling these games are known for. I love my gameplay being superb, and OTXO does that beautifully. However, the roguelike mechanics it runs with don't hold up quite as well.

Namely, the repetitiveness of roguelikes is REALLY felt here. Level order can change a bit along with layout, but once you've played a handful of runs, you know almost exactly what to expect. Since knowledge doesn't speed things up quite as much as I'd like, it can make getting through those earlier levels a slog. Especially when the passive selection is severely lacking.

The drip feed of new passives and guns is also lacking, even if a great idea in theory. Having to choose between getting new equipment to persist between runs or purchasing more passives you've already unlocked does give reasons to do different things while playing. Given how many of these can be useless outside of specific builds though, it can make the choice of going with what you already have unlocked all the more appealing. The guns are much less of an issue, but passives like bonuses for standing still in a game about being fast just feel silly.

To top it all off, certain builds are also severely damaged by the game's systems. For example, I wanted to try a Kunai build one time just for shits and giggles, and while it was fun to start the run off, you can't enter a boss room with a Kunai. That, combined with the fact bosses are hard to beat with the Kunai, made builds like that damn near unviable. The array of guns you need to pick up doesn't aid this either.

In the end, I still got a lot of enjoyment out of OTXO. When it wants to be a top-down shooter with visceral action, it does all that and more. When it wants to be a roguelike, however, it disappoints in several key areas. While I will likely return to this on occasion, I can't imagine this score will change much.

Like plenty of other people, I assume, I decided to try out OTXO after watching Raycevick's video that showered it with praise. Hotline Miami is one of my favorite games, and favorite game series, of all time, so a Hotline Miami inspired game felt right up my alley. I was looking forward to endlessly playing this for months on end if it was as good as Raycevick made it sound. However, while I understand most of the praise being given to this game, I ultimately just can't agree with it. It sacrifices so much of what made Hotline Miami work in service of its roguelike design that it ends up completely losing what made Hotline Miami so special in the first place.

I'll start of by pointing out what I liked about the game. The art style is pretty interesting, it's not the most unique style I've ever seen, but it gives the game a decently firm sense of identity. I also liked the general feel of the game, while I think it misses the mark of what Hotline Miami was aspiring to by quite a lot, it still manages to create a great combat loop, one that I would have loved a lot more if I wasn't constantly thinking about Hotline Miami while I was playing it.

Okay, now to get onto my big problem with the game.

Something that Raycevick forgot to mention (or maybe purposely didn't mention) while he was talking about Hotline Miami in his video was the importance of the quick restart. When you die in Hotline Miami, you just press a single button and you're thrown immeidtlay back in the fray with no loading screen. You just have to start at the beginning of the floor you died on. I firmly believe that this mechanic is the single most important aspect of Hotline Miami; it's what ties everything else together.

Hotline Miami is a game about aggression. reaction, and memorization. You're encouraged to run through the levels as fast as you can, obliterating anyone in front of you with whatever you have on you. And if you die? So what? Hit the restart button and get right back into it! The more you play, the more you'll memorize the layout of the buildings, the paths of the bots, and the reactions those bots will have. Once you get really good at the game, you can just blow through a level without even having to stop. Even those crazy levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number with ridiculously large areas become bearable once you remember death just means a quick restart. You're supposed to be a train going at ridiculously high speeds, and when you get into that conductor seat, there's really nothing else like it.

This is why the game is designed the way it is. Why enemies kill you in one hit, why you kill them in one hit, why enemies don't react to the carnage around them when you're using a silenced gun, and why enemies might not react to you if you're behind an ajar door. Every single thing is designed to make you be as fast and aggressive as possible, and it all starts with that quick restart.

Without that, you just wouldn't have Hotline Miami anymore.

And this is my biggest problem with OTXO.

Since OTXO is a roguelike that forces you to start at the very beginning of the game upon death, the game can't treat death as lightly as Hotline Miami. If the player could just die in one hit and be forced to go back to the beginning, it would be a miserable experience. And so, the game tips the scales in the player's favor in a more explicit manor than Hotline Miami does. It gives you way more health than the enemies, an insta-kill melee attack, and a bullet-time-like ability. And all of these are outside of the roguelike upgrades you can get!

But that's not all! Without the quick restart, the game also can't ask players to memorize layouts or enemy patterns, that would get far too frustrating far too quickly. So, it makes up for that by relying on procedurally generating level layouts, aside from the bosses who seem to all be the same as far as I can tell.

All of these shifts combined result in a game that is basically the exact opposite of Hotline Miami in a painfully frustrating way.

The level design gets so boring and tedious after only a few runs, bullet-time feels like a crutch to overly aid the player, enemies feel random and indistinct, and worst of all, the game doesn't feel fast.

Okay sure, it does feel fast, but not Hotline Miami fast. I'm not charging through these rooms obliterating everything I see as fast as I can for the thrill of it; I'm slowing bashing down doors and killing a few random dudes by going into slow-mo and trying to go quick so I can make more money to buy upgrades that are actually a little useful. Not only does it not feel quite like Hotline Miami, it feels like its in a completely different ballpark.

Also now that I mentioned it, I have to talk about the money system which reward you more money the faster you are. Hotline Miami also had an external reward for going fast, but that was just a high score and ranking system, it only mattered to the people who wanted to get A+ rankings. That way, people who were more timid could still play the game and get through it by doing the bare minimum. But in OTXO if you aren't fast, you're never going to get past the first floor, and that's something I just find aggravating.

There's also a few other issues I have, like how the story tries to be convoluted and unclear like Hotline Miami but fails to understand why Hotline Miami did that, and how you have to spend the money used for upgrades to unlock new weapons and trinkets which I find excessively annoying, but I don't think those complaints are all that important. My big problem is with the game's refusal to understand what made Hotline Miami work all while trying to "enhance" it.

Overall, I don't think OTXO is a bad game, but I don't think its a particularly great game either. It it was trying to be its own thing and had a visual style and gameplay that didn't just invoke Hotline Miami, I might have loved it. But as it is right now, I just can't recommend it to anyone that's coming to it in hopes of getting that same rush they got from playing Hotline Miami for the first time. If you want to play something that invokes the same sense of speed while having unique gameplay, please play Katana Zero instead. Or hell, just download the free community made levels in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. To me, there's just no real reason to play OTXO if you're a huge Hotline Miami fan like I am, and that's a damn shame.

The soundtrack is really good though.