"Do you enjoy hurting other people?"
If you're searching for something truly unique, you've found it. Without a doubt, Hotline Miami is one of the best games released in recent years.
The game's style of play is the not entirely uncommon twitch-shooter, it keeps the player on edge, and often in tears due to the amount of restarts you'll have to suffer through - often all of your own fault; the game has true difficulty, rather than a lot of artificial numbers being stacked against the player. Both the protagonist and the antagonists (for the most part) die in one hit - so expect to witness your gorey demise fairly often - fortunately, the game wastes no time in allowing you to jump directly back into the action.
And the game /is/ gorey - coupled with its hypnotic techno soundtrack consistently blaring in the background, it puts the player in an almost trance-like state. After completing each 'assignment,' you're forced to walk back through the massacre that you've brought about, and it's an awesome, terrible spectacle - many of the deaths and kill animations in this game are absurdly violent, which just adds to its dark charm.
It plays out almost like a horror game - for it is horrific, the murders that you'll commit in this game, and that's pressed only further by the storyline itself.
While the gameplay, the soundtrack, and the bright lights are often the main focus of the game, the storyline was my personal favorite part - it's one of the trippiest, most well-executed ones I've had the pleasure of playing through, and it's something best discovered by yourself.
For the asking price of 10$, Hotline Miami is something that belongs in every gamer's collection.