Bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Hotline Miami is a violent top down action game where death is everywhere. Sometimes the death of your enemies and also a lot of the death of you. Death comes quick and fast in this game, one shot, one hit from a bat and you are dead. And the same applies to the guys you're trying to kill as well for the most part. The levels in Hotline Miami are less about charging in head first and more about surveying the surroundings and figuring out how you can clear each room without getting mauled in the process. It's made much more forgiving by the fast reset time, you just hit 'r' at any point and you're right back at the beginning and back to it. This gives a small element of trial and error to the game, it's likely that you'll walk into a room get shot in the face and then figure out over time what's the best way to deal with that room.

There is a scoring system that the game uses to rate your performance on each level, I don't quite understand how to get higher scores I'm getting like C ranks over and over and I'm guessing that my trigger happy approach to solving some parts is probably the problem. The story in Hotline Miami is also super weird, there seems to be some internal logic that it abides by, but it really isn't making any sense to me right now. The only real thing that has really bugged me so far is the boss battles, they operate under very different rules than the rest of the game and ultimately they just become much less fun because it's not a matter of using your wits but more figuring out the pattern and just countering it.