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.

A disappointingly shallow Hotline Miami-like experience. After about an hour or so the core gameplay begins to feel samey and it goes from being angry at the game but having fun, to being angry at how genuinely poorly designed it is. Enemies who clump up together in very small rooms in the later levels with little variations in tactics or core gameplay other than maybe 2 new enemies types and the levels being much larger, but unlike Hotline Miami, no shift-look feature to look around and zoom out of the level to see them from offscreen. It also doesn't help that the hotline miami styled trial and error gameplay doesn't work here since it's a one-life game. The smash-tv like formula hotline has just doesn't work for a rogue like.

fills the hotline miami shaped hole in my heart by improving virtually every single element. the straightforward way of saying it is that guns feel very good and killing people in that game feel very good. drinks makes it feel even more good to kill people. its a game that feels extremely good being enhanced by guns that sound like actual guns and good music. i did not care or even looked anything about the story but tbh i dont think it really matters much in this game. Main problem is that for a roguelike after you finished once there really isnt that much of a reason to continue.

A less melee and tactics focused Hotline Miami with some roguelike elements that gives you a quick to recharge slow motion toggle and dodge move to fight quick reacting enemies.

Your characters puts on a mask and suddenly finds themself washed up on a beach near a mansion where he is told he can't leave or die and that he needs to fight his way to the deeper part of the mansion to destroy the heart. You will fight through rooms where you will need to kill all enemies to proceed. To do that you pick up, shoot, reload, and throw guns at enemies, kick enemies and doors with doors near enemies being able to kill them, toggle on slow motion, and perform a dive move that can avoid bullets. The base mechanics are fine but I don't enjoy the enemies that take multiple hits to kill and your own large health bar. Mostly all your trying to avoid doing is destroy too many doors or glass windows that can lead to larger groups of enemies engaging you or sneaking up on you, as long as you don't break open a door or window enemies are unable to get through them.

Every three areas and in the first area of a new run is a bar where you can spend coins (first one of the run is free) that you get from killing enemies and maintaining a high combo for higher rewards on different types of alcohol that give you passive bonuses. The abilities you can gain from the bars might do something like allowing you to do more damage when stationary, reload faster, recharge your slow motion ability faster or they can give more targeted buffs to certain types of weapons or give you abilities that allow for unique playstyles like allowing you to block bullets, gain a kunai if you roll while holding no weapon, transform kunai into a throwing axe that you can summon back to you, etc. As the bars are limited to only three kinds of drinks unless you spend even more to restock you could easily thing that your likely to be stuck with completely useless or contradictory things for your runs most of the time but one of the only positives I can give the game is that if you get to a bar and choose to save and go back to the main menu and then reload it will change the drink menu, actually allowing you to pick up skills that might make the game more fun or interesting for you, if you don't mind rerolling drinks as many times as needed.

The available weapons can also be changed up by toggling what guns are available or not in your next run which also means it effects what weapons enemies will use. Trying to do an all pistol or sniper rifle run might be fun but you do have to keep in mind that doing so might make boss fights much more difficult. Once you get through six stages you will fight a boss before moving to another area with six stages and a boss, the new area might introduce a new enemy or give enemies a bonus like having extra armor. Every boss is a tedious bullet sponge with a small number of attacks that become easy to predict over time, while the main enemies aren't as much fun as they lack the more visceral nature of the kills of your opponents in something like Hotline Miami or even other slow motion using top down games like The Hong Kong Massacre, these bosses have no reaction to being shot at all and are some of the worst bosses I've seen in a genre like this.

Fighting the main enemies is ok but not as much fun as similar games I've played in this style. The bosses are terrible. I personally hate the music. A lot of the guns and abilities just aren't that fun to use. You can, in an inefficient way, tailor a run to work more in a way you find interesting which seems more like an unintentional feature or engine issue (like not being able to use the mouse on menus, not being able to save Steam screenshots, not being able to change the mouse sensitivity that are related to the game engine) as it certainly isn't something the game tells you. If you don't reload for abilities you end up with frequent terrible choices that can have either nothing to do with your playstyle or you might want to play in a certain way but it requires having multiple abilities together that can take too long to find otherwise. There also just isn't that much content and what there is it pretty much wants you to do all of in one run, by the time I was done I didn't even have anything practical left to buy as an upgrade and the logical endpoint of the run should have come around three sets of stages prior.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1739140204244652227
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2nNEv7kCco&t=335s&ab_channel=Legolas_Katarn

I've kind of hit a wall with this, progress wise, and as much as I loved it initially - I can't say it's really hooking me in to break through that wall.

It makes a tremendous first impression. It looks and sounds incredible; a super satisfying top down shooter that looks to expand on some of the groundwork laid down by Hotline Miami. Lofty goals! But I think it does an admirable job, with its own innovations and sense of style that makes it feel more unique. But as the difficulty spikes and I don't really feel that I'm 'learning' per se - I think I'll just take a breather from it right now.

Hard to stick a rating on it, so I won't just yet.

Pro-tip: you can freely reroll your drink selection by Save+Quit then Continue. Tune the game to your difficulty by re-rolling abilities as needed.

Definitely a grower, OTXO is a tough as nails twin stick roguelike inspired by Hotline Miami. The ability modifiers really open this game up in cool ways, dual wield SMGs, get a support drone, splatter enemies. All paired with a combo system that rewards wreckless aggression. Sprint from enemy to enemy to rack up a combo, then use that gold to buy more abilities so you can build a better combo to get more gold etc etc etc.

There's a few balancing issues with some abilities being near useless while others being almost required for a good run (I'm looking at you drone support and dual wielding). Additionally readability can be a bit tough due to the limited color palette.

Overall though, this hooked me hard for a couple of days, a solid experience.

Achingly mid. Sure, it ~resembles~ Hotline Miami, in a very shallow sort of way, but it lacks that special touch.

Where Hotline Miami (1, anyway) is bold, shocking, beautiful, transgressive, and lovely, this game is completely rote. It lacks so much of what I love about that game, and instead replaces it with a drab monochrome roguelike. A game about careful positioning and clever engagement reduced to slo-mo and dodge rolls. You can't kick a guy into a wall and bash his skull in with a hammer, or use doors as improvisational weapons, or ride the tense razor's edge of a single hit. The mildly intriguing premise quickly gives way to tedium. And the music sucks.

I might return to this later, but where I voraciously devoured Hotline Miami in an afternoon, I have been procrastinating playing more of this. I'm going to take that as the sign it should be and shelve it for later.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for January 2024, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before February 6th, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A mad shoot-out of black and white, and red all over.

Otxo and I’m trying to go by how the developer pronounced it, takes the fast-paced combat of Hotline Miami, gives the enemies bigger guns, and larger areas, and then creates a rogue-lite where players are forced to travel through 40 rooms of a mansion to save someone close to them. There’s not a lot of plot or story, but there’s a ton of action and combat, which is the driving force of Otxo.

I don’t like this title, but I also am going to say I think it’s mostly because it’s such a fast and twitchy shooter. The combat seems over the top but the entire time I just wanted a second to make each decision. There is a focus mode but I needed more than that. Mostly I found myself flailing around against enemies. The only way I was able to find success was to line up shots to kill multiple enemies as I kicked doors open, and maybe that is the way it’s intended but it never felt natural to me.

Pick this up if you loved Hotline Miami but wanted more guns, faster gameplay, and a rogue-lite rather than a story-based game. I’ll be honest, I’m probably too old for this game and my reaction times have dried up, but since I never was as enamored with Hotline Miami’s gameplay, I’m not surprised I didn’t enjoy this one either.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/6IY4Gl2JdaQ

OTXO is a fun time, but as far as roguelites go, it's absurdly excessive. 40 straight levels of thundering gunshots and hordes of enemies, by the time you get halfway through it your wrist is gonna need a break from all the lightning quick turns youll be making. it took me 2 hours to complete the game, and i think that's a long time for a run to last. some bosses feel very samey, but overall it's just too relentless to enjoy a full 2 hours of non-stop action. especially when i cant adjust my mouse sensitivity (the oddest choice ever, what the fuck). hotline miami is the first thing to come to mind when looking at this game, and that's a fair comparison. top-down shooter, combos, and punishing combat, the two games are almost family. however, otxo lacks the methodical tactician mindset of approaching a hotline miami level where you solve encounters through continuous trial and error. otxo is very much the opposite. you think on the fly. you have no room for error because death means a complete restart due to the nature of the genre. the little planning you can make is to hold chokepoints to lure groups of enemies into a kill room. otherwise, youll be rushing into a room. hell-brazen with lead to spit out into the poor souls inside, turning them into pools of blood. otxo is a real fucking nice looking game, i dig the monochromatic art style. yet it's also too noisy. so much blends in together that it can be hard to find a gun on the ground, notice an enemy that's still alive, or, at times, even figure out where you are on the screen. but visual clutter aside, the biggest problem is progression. unlocking new weapons and perks feels almost right. buffs in this game are liquors you can buy from a bartender and saleswoman, they give you various attributes and effects that can be really good (e.g. dodging bullets refills slow-mo meter) or useless (e.g. kicking enemy bullets refills slow-mo meter). this was well implemented, it's nothing crazy and is a system found in many games. put money into unlocking new perks for future runs, yadda yadda. however, new weapons are locked behind an rng encounter. sometimes, when moving between levels, you enter a combat-free room with readable lore (which is alright, but I still dunno whats going on. I'm just guessing it's some allegory for purgatory) and a gachapon machine. the gacha machine is where you cough up some bucks to unlock a new gun, if youre lucky. see, sometimes, instead of a shiny new mac 10, you could get a little funkopop. so not only do you need to get lucky to get into the room, but you also need to hope to get a new gun instead of some plastic crap that gamers love. I mean, it's not entirely terrible. collectibles are neat, but cmon man, the gacha room was already a chance encounter. don't add more variables to possibly unlocking new guns!! because of this, i only got about 5 new guns out of the many possible others. not gonna completely complain, i got to kill the final boss with a lever action shotgun, but i really wish i got to see the complete arsenal and liquor cabinet. this game is not that hard. you can cheese it fairly easily with certain liquors and strats. I beat the game on my 4th attempt; I must be some super gamer, though, let's just say that. difficulty is very subjective, but once i found the ideal strat for clearing rooms and got the right perks, i breezed through level after level. bosses werent even a problem for the most part. they have well-choreographed attacks but are also quite easy to dodge. Only 2 of the bosses actually scared me by getting me to impossibly low health, thankfully one of them is the final boss. my point here though is that i first-timed every single boss encounter, dying to my own fumbles in previous levels. again, it could just be my hotline miami veteran skills kicking in, but it felt that i should've been grinding this game longer to then finally face the last boss.

i seemed to have been quite negative in this review, and that's mostly because i'm fairly disappointed by a game i was really excited to get into. overall, it's not bad; it's a good time if you ever felt the itch for a hotline miami esque roguelite, but don't go into this to expect the same awe of the hotline miami games. however, i still believe it's a quality game. the combat is satisfyingly explosive, quenching any thirst for explosive 2D ultraviolence. good game if you want a quick roguelite.