Hotline Miami/The Hong Kong Massacre

[Wallcrawler]

I was never a top down shooter fan since the terrible experience with Grand Theft Auto 2. Clunky controls, hard to drive, just soured the whole thing. Every top down game from then on that I saw, instantly took me back to GTA 2.

Fast forward a hundred years to John Wick 4, and the top down view of clearing a building with a shotgun with Dragons breath rounds. Pretty slick sequence, and I began to hear the game Hotline Miami referenced repeatedly in regard to this scene.

I thought that seemed like it would be cool to do, and so I picked up the Hotline Miami 1&2 bundle. What an insanely good game this is, truly a game you shouldn't judge by its looks. It is a retro, 8 bit style top down groundhog day style murder simulator in which all participants die in a single hit.

You will die. Hundreds of times, but none of it matters as a simple button press has you respawned and back in action with 0 load times and at most maybe 60 seconds of progress lost.

If you've seen Nic Cage in the film NEXT, where he could see 2 minutes into the future, and find out how and where he would be killed in any situation he approached, until he became like an all knowing God and just knew exactly where every hint of danger was for the perfect run.

Or Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow where he repeatedly dues on that beach over and over getting a little further each time, until he just has the entire battle memorized and becomes a one man army destroying everything in his path.

You feel like this quite regularly and despite its pixelated presentation and cartoonish gore, the flawless wholesale slaughter creates such a huge dopamine hit that you can't wait for the next level, to do it all over again.

The combination of melee combat and firearms is mixed well in the original game, but leans much farther toward gunplay in the second. Perhaps the most unforgiving aspect if Hotline Miami is that you can be killed from an enemy that isn't even on the screen, a deal breaker for many gamers. This is especially prevalent in part two with much larger levels and less cover to utilize. If you were a melee purist in the original, you may have trouble adjusting to part two. However I find both games to be absolute masterpieces of their genre, with one of the most incredible soundtracks ever paired to gameplay.

While I owe it to John Wick 4 that I even experienced these games, I was pretty surprised to hear in an interview that Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stihelski had never heard of Hotline Miami.

Stihelski admitted that the inspiration for the scene in the film did come from avideo game, but the game was titled The Hong Kong Massacre.

Instantly, I'm intrigued, having finished and played to death both Hotline Miami 1 and 2, somewhere there was another game that inspired this scene. I quickly found it on sale at the PS Store for 20 bucks, and blindly threw my money at the television. A couple minutes of downloading later, and I'm in.

And HOLY SHIT was I not disappointed. Clearly inspired by Hotline Miami, but gone are the 8 bit sprites in favor of more realistic looking characters on the screen. The game has no option for melee combat which was a bit disappointing to commit to just gunplay, but I was still here for it. The guns sound amazing, the particle effects of the destructible environments and torrents of blood when scoring again, that one hit kill style of gameplay were fantastic.

Gone was the threat of being killed from offscreen, which was a welcome reduction in tension and the implementation of what can only be called what it is, a ripoff of Max Payne's shootdodge, complete with optional slow motion bullet time effect was the chefs kiss.

The dive/dodge mechanic has several invincibility frames in which enemy bullets simply cannot hit you. The frames last longer if slow motion is activated, so diving through a window through a hail of bullets while you spray lead around the room killing everyone inside is an act of violence that one could only dream of in Hotline Miami. Sliding across the floor on your knees taking out 3 guys with a single shotgun blast and trying in vain to keep your jaw off the floor is a common occurrence here, but the dodging and slow motion isn't an invincibility card.

The live, die, repeat formula is in full swing here as you encounter more and more heavily armed enemies, so crashing through that window in slow motion, only to have your dive animation end before you've killed everyone can often result in a hilarious suck starting of their shotguns and sidearm.

Again, instantly put back into the action with no load screens, the only delay would be if you chose to take a different weapon into the map this time.

The better you play, speed, accuracy, and refraining from using slow motion as a crutch earn upgrade points to upgrade your weapon performance, so there is reason to perfect your killing strategy on subsequent playthroughs.

If you saw John Wick 4 and thought that Shotgun scene would be fun to play in a game, I highly recommend checking out these 3 titles.

Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
The Hong Kong Massacre