Game Review #4
I graduated from High School back in June of 2016, and at the time my dad gave me a $100 Steam Gift Card as a graduation present. This worked out nicely, as the game that I spent most of my time playing, World of Warcraft, was experiencing its worst expansion (at the time). Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I decided to use that $100 to buy a bunch of games on the Steam Summer Sale, but I quickly ran out of ideas on what to buy. I decided to turn to my friends, and I asked them for recommendations on good games. One of my friends, who really enjoyed bullet-hell shooters, gave two recommendations: Undertale and Hotline Miami.
I bought both, along with many recommendations from my other friends, but I tried Undertale first and quickly fell in love with it. Instead of trying any of the other games, I spent the next few weeks replaying Undertale multiple times, and the other games began metaphorically collecting dust in my Steam Library. However, once I had finally played Undertale enough, I decided to move onto the second game, and I naturally decided to pick Hotline Miami; if my friend’s first recommendation ended up being something I loved, surely his second recommendation would be just as good.
Initially, this didn’t seem to be the case, and I found myself incredibly frustrated by the difficulty curve present within Hotline Miami. While it had a similar gameplay style to Undertale in the sense that both were 2D and required you to avoid fast-moving projectiles, Hotline Miami dropped you straight into the deep end. There was no gradual learning curve where you defeated progressively more challenging enemies, culminating in an exceptionally difficult boss fight. In Hotline Miami you die a lot, and the game expects this. You only have a single hitpoint, meaning that at some point you’re bound to make a mistake and get hit by an enemy. To account for this, the game allows for you to restart the level in seconds. Instead of allowing you to clumsily push on through the challenges it presents, Hotline Miami wants you to slam your face into it over and over, failing repeatedly until you manage to get that one perfect attempt where everything goes right.
At first, this design frustrated me, as it forced me to play extremely cautiously. I would spend minutes clearing each level, taking immense care to sneak around and only fire my gun if I was sure that I would hit the enemy. While this did prove to be effective, it also wasn’t very fun, as my occasional mistake would cause me to lose many minutes of meticulous setup, a trend that would prove very frustrating. In my frustration, I decided to abandon this strategy, and I would begin rushing headfirst into new levels hoping to perfectly land every shot.
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work out very well, but before long I began to realize that I was having far more fun with this method than I was with my previous strategy. Even if I failed far more now than I was before, these failures were happening very quickly, meaning that I was able to adjust my plans at a much faster rate. Additionally, the adrenaline rush that I would get from successfully pulling off one of these strategies was something I had never experienced before, and it made the challenge far more enjoyable. While it took some time for it to grow on me, Hotline Miami opened my eyes to what the point of a bullet-hell shooter really was, and I loved it. Ever since I first played Hotline Miami in the summer of 2016, my tastes in games has radically shifted, and I’ve constantly sought out the next game to push me to my limit. Even if I find the challenge to be incredibly frustrating, I know that the rush I’ll feel from overcoming it will make things worth it.
