Hotline: Miami - What do the different masks do?
[Written by by Adam Hartley]
The 2D top-down classic Hotline Miami is unquestionably one of the most demanding and satisfyingly “tough-but-rewarding” games to be given the remastering treatment by NVIDIA recently for inclusion in the launch line-up for its new NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV.
The release of such an unashamedly “gamer’s game” by NVIDIA is a positive portent of things to come with SHIELD. In addition to supporting eye-wateringly high-resolution gaming, the new SHIELD will also pump out the pulsing electro soundtrack to Hotline Miami across your 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system to remind us all how classic retro arcade-style gaming can really feel when it’s married with the best-in-class gaming tech available in 2015.
Originally developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital, Hotline Miami drops players in a pixelated 1989 Miami cityscape reimagined as the perilous playground of a masked vigilante called Jacket. As Jacket, players shoot their way through the game’s ultraviolent levels while progressing through this devilishly difficult game.
An understanding of the various masks is vital
Jacket follows the mysterious messages that are left for him on his answering machine (remember those!?) which give him the instructions he needs to rid Miami of the blight of Russian mafia.
Firstly, be warned. You will die in Hotline Miami. A lot! But you will also have a strong desire to persevere and beat the onslaught of enemies in the game. And to do so, you will need superfast reflexes, a twitchy trigger finger hovering over your mouse-button and a thorough understanding of what each and all of the various masks in the game can do to help you through each level.
The numerous animal masks that appear in this hallucinogenic gun rampage of a game were apparently inspired originally by Dennis Wedin’s childhood nightmares that, by all accounts, largely revolved around Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows.
From bats, snakes, fish, foxes and panthers through to pigs, walruses, giraffes, tigers, rabbits, crocodiles, horses, dogs and unicorns (and lots more), each unlockable mask in Hotline Miami has a unique power that it bestows on Jacket and can be selected by the player at the start of each chapter. The only mask that doesn’t really do anything is the default rooster mask, “Richard”. And to unlock and obtain the rest of the masks in the game you will need to reach a sufficiently high enough score or find some of them hidden across the various chapters in the game.
For a definitive list of all the Hotline Miami masks, along with a detailed description of how each will help you advance through the beautifully bonkers storyline that defines the game, you can head over to the Hotline Miami wiki, a site that is certainly worth bookmarking before you embark on the latest rework of this challenging gangster gun battle on the NVIDIA SHIELD.
Hotline Miami is available to download on Google Play for the NVIDIA SHIELD right now. Which is pretty much an essential purchase once you’ve invested in NVIDIA’s SHIELD Android TV, also now available to own starting at $199.
There’s no masking the fact that this is one seriously impressive piece of gaming hardware. Providing, of course, that your gamer mettle is up to it and that you are man enough to take on the full and frightening might of the Russian mafia in a truly hallucinatory 1980s Miami!
This article is sponsored as part of Steel Media Preferred Partners.