Gore, electronica and a slick old school visual design combine to make a top rate, top down murder fest.
The game really isn't all that complicated, the idea is usually just to kill everyone in an area, room or building, starting with your bare hands and working up through a variety of different weapons to execute bloody visceral brutality on everyone in your way. The gameplay for the most part is in a pretty much standard top down shooter style, but what sets it apart from other top down shooters is a near perfect feeling control scheme and a couple of extremely visceral hand to hand moves that make the game feel both refreshing and brutally interactive. Beyond this, as the game progresses, you are given the option of using different masks that augment certain abilities, such as allowing you to punch harder, kill people by hitting them with doors or giving you access to more weaponry. These add some nice variety on how to approach each level.
When trying to take your foes down in any given level, (aside from the aforementioned face masks) a number of considerations have to be taken into account. First of all you die in pretty much a single hit so stealth kills are always a good idea. You can keep things quiet through using melee weapons such as knives and baseball bats to avoid grabbing attention from additional adversaries. Taking a loud approach requires you to make clever use of doors as cover or a means in which to stun enemies and finding sensible choke points to avoid being overwhelmed by a horde of alerted enemies.
Speaking of death, it's something the game appears to want to immerse you in at every given opportunity, if you aren't decorating walls with the blood and grey matter of your enemies then you are likely having your own smeared about the place by them. Your personal death count will likely be counted in 10's before the completion of each mission as one moment of hesitation or poor planning will likely result in death. This really adds to tension in the game when you know that you are nearing completion of a level, but doesn't often amount to too much frustration as it takes little more than a press of the R key to get you back into action at the start of each short stage.
As you progress through the game you will learn a few clues as to what is actually going on around your character, what kind of person your character is and who keeps leaving messages on his answer phone giving him the orders to go out and commit such vicious acts. The story isn't in depth by any means but the game provides such a unique style and atmosphere that you can't help be intrigued as to what all of this mess is about, and you will find out relatively quickly if you keep your reactions sharp and your cocaine consumption to a minimum as the game really isn't very long. The games' length is perhaps the only real negative to Hotline Miami as it can be completed comfortably in 3 hours. That said, the high score and ranking system, steam achievements and unlockable masks add to the replayability if the fast, slick and brutal gameplay isn't draw enough on its own and there are a collection of secret items in each level to solve a mysterious puzzle.
Hotline Miami is a short but extremely entertaining murder fest that is easy to recommend to anyone who likes fun, lots of red and purple pixels and awesome 80's style settings.