Hotline Miami is a top-down shooter where you play as a deranged man who murders entire groups of people at the whims of a voice from his phone. The game is famous for its incredible soundtrack, bright visuals, and of course, high difficulty: whichever the stage, your character will die in only one hit. A mere press of a button will respawn you back at the beginning of the stage, making for an intense and rewarding action experience.
The Hong Kong Massacre... wishes it was that game.
I'm a Hotline Miami fan, and when met with the promise of Hotline Miami with the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne in a Hong Kong detective thriller, I was instantly hooked. THKM did not receive the best of review ratings, but with an average 71 on Metacritic, I expected it to be at least serviceable. I did not expect it to be so aggressively underwhelming.
I usually like opening reviews by explaining the premise of the game, but a paragraph can fit the entirety of the narrative with room to spare. You're a detective whose partner was executed by the Hong Kong Triads, and who sets off in a murderous rampage as revenge, invading triad hideouts and killing everyone inside, all the way to the triad's boss. The end.
It's clear the game is trying to mimic the first HL's vague and trippy storytelling here -- from the disjointed sequences, to an ending that abruptly cuts the story, to even using a friendly bartender as an intermission -- but it doesn't seem to understand why its inspiration worked so well. Every aspect of HL felt surreal, from the visuals to the music to the increasingly uncomfortable cutscenes, and most of all, it did not bother to offer an explanation for the killing (at least, not in the first game). For all you knew, you were a psychopath, or a drug addict, a lowlife living to slaughter others.
THKM feels incredibly restrained in comparison. The premise is a pretty run of the mill detective story with no ambiguity or sense of urgency that fails to escalate in any meaningful way. To make it worse, the dodgy, mistake-laden writing, clumsy exposition and repetitive, blurry cutscenes actually do a disservice to the storytelling instead of adding to it. And considering how long the game is, it really needed something to carry the experience along.
THKM makes some great arguments for the idea that less is more, the first being in its length. Like its inspiration, the game is a top-down shooter where you have to kill every enemy in a given area without getting hit. There are thirty stages of that, plus five bosses, and it would have been better to take away at least half of those.
That's because there are not enough environment assets, or enemy types, or weapon types, or even OST tracks to carry that many stages, and there's a feeling at multiple points in the game of "having played this stage before". Heck, the bosses are probably the worst offenders, as they are all the same long, drawn out fight that plays out in a slightly different environment, and where the otherwise unremarkable goon has a different name.
There's also a case to be made for less visual fidelity. The game's complex visuals and blurry effects make it hard to see enemies and gunshots, as well as to understand which parts of your environment are solid and which aren't. HL did a fine job at that by coloring its enemies with bright colors and making breakable obstacles distinct, but here, you really need to look carefully and keep count of the goons in your head to avoid cheap deaths.
Speaking of cheap deaths, let's talk about having enemies that are less smart and capable. Enemies in THKM are incredibly alert and will shoot you as soon as one of their hairs is onscreen. They make impossible trickshots through corners and ajar doors, but at the same time, they're also not easily baited, and keep mobile so to weave through your bullets. Most of them even have a dodge-roll which, like the player's, gives invincibility frames. There's nothing quite as annoying as perfectly executing a stunt, but being put in a bad spot and dying because a couple of enemies frame-perfect dodged your bullets like agents in The Matrix.
Finally, the star system, where you complete stages without using slowmotion or missing any shots and get points to upgrade your weapons? That should have been completely scrapped. Not only does the weapon upgrade system exacerbate the disparity between weapon types, but the stars force you to play the game in unfun, nearly unplayable ways.
Is the game completely disfunctional? Not really, it's just underdeveloped in every regard. The core of the gameplay, the top-down shoot-outs with bullet time abilities, actually works pretty well, and had the level design provided some variety and the other elements of the game worked to enhance the core mechanics instead of detract from them, we could have had a respectable HL clone.
As it is, though... The Hong Kong Massacre is undeniably less than the sum of its parts. It looks good on Youtube, but there are better options to actually play. If you want Hotline Miami or Max Payne, just redownload those games, and if you want HK police drama... I don't know, may I suggest Sleeping Dogs? That's an underrated videogame that does the triad thing really well. And it often goes on sale for less than THKM, too.
The Hong Kong Massacre... wishes it was that game.
I'm a Hotline Miami fan, and when met with the promise of Hotline Miami with the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne in a Hong Kong detective thriller, I was instantly hooked. THKM did not receive the best of review ratings, but with an average 71 on Metacritic, I expected it to be at least serviceable. I did not expect it to be so aggressively underwhelming.
I usually like opening reviews by explaining the premise of the game, but a paragraph can fit the entirety of the narrative with room to spare. You're a detective whose partner was executed by the Hong Kong Triads, and who sets off in a murderous rampage as revenge, invading triad hideouts and killing everyone inside, all the way to the triad's boss. The end.
It's clear the game is trying to mimic the first HL's vague and trippy storytelling here -- from the disjointed sequences, to an ending that abruptly cuts the story, to even using a friendly bartender as an intermission -- but it doesn't seem to understand why its inspiration worked so well. Every aspect of HL felt surreal, from the visuals to the music to the increasingly uncomfortable cutscenes, and most of all, it did not bother to offer an explanation for the killing (at least, not in the first game). For all you knew, you were a psychopath, or a drug addict, a lowlife living to slaughter others.
THKM feels incredibly restrained in comparison. The premise is a pretty run of the mill detective story with no ambiguity or sense of urgency that fails to escalate in any meaningful way. To make it worse, the dodgy, mistake-laden writing, clumsy exposition and repetitive, blurry cutscenes actually do a disservice to the storytelling instead of adding to it. And considering how long the game is, it really needed something to carry the experience along.
THKM makes some great arguments for the idea that less is more, the first being in its length. Like its inspiration, the game is a top-down shooter where you have to kill every enemy in a given area without getting hit. There are thirty stages of that, plus five bosses, and it would have been better to take away at least half of those.
That's because there are not enough environment assets, or enemy types, or weapon types, or even OST tracks to carry that many stages, and there's a feeling at multiple points in the game of "having played this stage before". Heck, the bosses are probably the worst offenders, as they are all the same long, drawn out fight that plays out in a slightly different environment, and where the otherwise unremarkable goon has a different name.
There's also a case to be made for less visual fidelity. The game's complex visuals and blurry effects make it hard to see enemies and gunshots, as well as to understand which parts of your environment are solid and which aren't. HL did a fine job at that by coloring its enemies with bright colors and making breakable obstacles distinct, but here, you really need to look carefully and keep count of the goons in your head to avoid cheap deaths.
Speaking of cheap deaths, let's talk about having enemies that are less smart and capable. Enemies in THKM are incredibly alert and will shoot you as soon as one of their hairs is onscreen. They make impossible trickshots through corners and ajar doors, but at the same time, they're also not easily baited, and keep mobile so to weave through your bullets. Most of them even have a dodge-roll which, like the player's, gives invincibility frames. There's nothing quite as annoying as perfectly executing a stunt, but being put in a bad spot and dying because a couple of enemies frame-perfect dodged your bullets like agents in The Matrix.
Finally, the star system, where you complete stages without using slowmotion or missing any shots and get points to upgrade your weapons? That should have been completely scrapped. Not only does the weapon upgrade system exacerbate the disparity between weapon types, but the stars force you to play the game in unfun, nearly unplayable ways.
Is the game completely disfunctional? Not really, it's just underdeveloped in every regard. The core of the gameplay, the top-down shoot-outs with bullet time abilities, actually works pretty well, and had the level design provided some variety and the other elements of the game worked to enhance the core mechanics instead of detract from them, we could have had a respectable HL clone.
As it is, though... The Hong Kong Massacre is undeniably less than the sum of its parts. It looks good on Youtube, but there are better options to actually play. If you want Hotline Miami or Max Payne, just redownload those games, and if you want HK police drama... I don't know, may I suggest Sleeping Dogs? That's an underrated videogame that does the triad thing really well. And it often goes on sale for less than THKM, too.