Hotline Miami Trophies – Platinum Obsession Review

Obtaining all of the Hotline Miami trophies was an interesting experience. At times it tested my patience, especially getting A+ on all levels (achieving a certain score). After a while though, I learned that combos were the only way to get this trophy, and that pretty much involved equipping the right mask (lengthening combo window) and sprinting around the map trying to kill as many enemies before the combo window ends. This results in A LOT of frustrating deaths.

The game has a simple gameplay loop, that at its core, is quite simple and satisfying. When you break it down though, whilst trying to obtain A+ on all of the chapters, it can be quite punishing. I found the quickest way to get the combos was to use melee items, as they are one-hit kills and you also gain a bonus. When you shoot someone you get fewer points. So, this involved getting up close and personal with all of the gangsters. These guys are brutal and quite unpredictable. They move very fast and any damage one-shots you, so a missed melee strike or a missed throw of your weapon results in an instadeath most of the time. Safe to say, it became quite rage-inducing. By the end of it I was kind of over the loop, and whilst I still really enjoyed the game, having to play some levels over and over a couple of hours or so did become tiresome.

The early levels are pretty easy, but through the middle of the game the enemy numbers are boosted and a lot more of them have weapons. One particular stage involves storming a police station that is crawling with cops supporting ARs. Another level has higher level gangsters that take more damage to kill, and seem to move slightly faster. These guys became the bane of my existence at times, as they raced across the map absorbing 5 AR bullets and then one-shot meleeing me from metres away. Additionally, there were stages with glass windows that enemies with shotguns would camp behind, and as soon as you got close to their FOV they would seemingly snipe you before you could even see them. The game is trial and error, and in some stages is almost impossible to gain an A+ on unless you learn every enemy’s pattern throughout the chapter. This just takes time and can get repetitive. Luckily, the gameplay is extremely satisfying so it’s not too painful.

After getting high scores on all chapters, I was left with a couple of finicky trophies. These were ones that I probably should’ve been tracking but hadn’t bothered with. The most painful of these was probably performing every ground kill in the game, where you need to perform executions with all 21 melee weapons in the game. This was time-consuming because the weapons are random spawns and you need to finish the level for it to save your progress – so you couldn’t just get the execution and re-start the level, you need to finish the entire stage (multiple floors) before moving on to the next weapon. I did find a decent way to farm this, there is a certain level that spawns in a lot of melee weapons (chapter 5). This just took an hour or 2 of running through chapter 5 hoping to find the right weapons.

Finally, there was a trophy that required you to play a level with the bat mask. This mask reverses your left and right analog sticks so up is down, left is right, etc. Kindly, they didn’t make you finish one of the harder levels with this as I could’ve seen it being rage-inducing, but instead it was pretty fun.

Collecting all of the trophies in Hotline Miami took me around 20 hours overall, slightly more than the recommended time. Whilst it was a very enjoyable game that was complemented perfectly by the art style and musical score, it still seemed to drag on a little longer than I would’ve liked. Hotline Miami trophies collected. Platinum Obtained.