Violence. Yeah, that seems like a pretty good way to open up this review. Violence is everywhere and we cannot deny that. There’s violence in books, film, conversation, and plenty other places, but I don’t want this discussion to get too touchy or depressing. So instead we’re gonna discuss what we usually discuss and that’s video games. The number one place you go to fulfill whatever fantasies you have no matter how morbid they can be… or weird. I’m not one for violence, but sometimes all a man needs is a nonsensical action game to keep his thumbs busy while plotting out his next subject matter. Background noise to fill in the blanks, because he doesn’t want to go question his life and wonder where it all went horribly wrong. For the last few weeks the game that served as good background noise to me is OTXO, a top down roguelike shooter developed by Nathan Haddock under his independent studio Lateralis Heavy Industries. Full disclosure. I did not know this game existed until it was brought up to me by a content creator I follow named Raycevick. He makes some truly fascinating essays about well known shooting games, but one of his more recent videos brought up this unknown gem. I believe he’s one of the few people out there to do a major review for OTXO, and I don’t want to look like I’m trying to steal his idea.
Might be overthinking it, but just want to let you dear readers know. Go check Raycevick. He’s one of the best gaming content creators you could be listening to. Anyways, OTXO is a tribute to what is possibly one of the most well renowned indies ever made. It was highly controversial at the time of it’s release, but since then has garnished high praise and seen as a bloody work of art. That game is Hotline Miami developed by Dennaton Games. A blood pumping rampage where you take down badmen in the most gorey yet realistic way possible. This was a game about the animalistic nature of man. It’s represented by the many animal masks you wear throughout the game, and nothing being brought out but the worst in a person. It’s art, and several times in the past I’ve expressed my respect for an artist’s vision even if the vision is whack. That being said, I do not like Hotline Miami and I don’t know why. I beat the game a year or two ago and it’s left a sour taste in my mouth ever since I rolled credits. Which is weird, because I like a lot of the titles it helped inspire like Katana Zero, Ape Out, and Bloodroots. It was doing something right, but it just wasn’t clicking for me. The one hit kill gameplay stopped being fun when the game became unfair and frustrating. Enemies having pin point accuracy with guns and being able to kill you within first sight. Unable to see what could kill you off screen. Visual clutter makes it difficult to read the room and see items you can pick up. It just wasn’t fun.
Here we are with OTXO that takes heavy inspiration from Hotline Miami. This should not have been a game I’d enjoy, but after listening to the Raycevick video on it I slowly grew interested. A friend gifted me the game during a Steam sale a few weeks back, and I’ve been playing it ever since. Usually as a break in between the bigger projects I had in mind. OTXO did the impossible for me. It gave me a form of Hotline Miami that was actually playable and for a while it was pure addiction that I just wanted to keep shooting into my veins. OTXO is great and has easily turned into one of the best underrated roguelikes I’ve ever played. I should state though that I have not beaten this game. A majority of my reviews are games I’ve beaten, but I have nie hours in OTXO and the furthest I’ve ever gotten was floor thirty. I have seen almost everything this game has to offer and have enough evidence to present to my dear readers a full review. Let's talk about why I quite like OTXO and why it deserves your humble attention.
Story
The game opens up with our main protagonist riding on a train. He and his lover are enjoying a relaxing evening when the man sitting in front of him gets up, tosses a mask onto the ground, and walks off the train. Our protagonist stares at the mask with awe and picks it up. The mask has no eye holes, is made of pure metal, and is coated with bleak white. It’s intriguing and he debates whether or not to put the mask on. He continues staring at the mask until reality around him distorts and falls apart. He is knocked out unconscious and awakens along the shores of a beach. The beach stretches for miles with no way of getting off it. In front of the protagonist is a manor and at the entrance of the manor are individuals ready to greet him. He’s told that he is the new OTXO and that picking up the mask was probably the biggest mistake in his life. He now sits at the outskirts of the Manor, a paranormal place that is constantly shifting around. Lifeless husks await in the manor those who wish to destroy the Heart.
The only sane individuals left reside in the first room and stay around to help those who possibly want to escape. You’ve been separated by your lover and believe she resides near the heart, so it now becomes your goal to fight through the Manor. Kill everything that stands in your way, and destroy the heart. However, due to your lack of experience in fighting you are quickly cut down by enemy gunfire. Awakening back at the shores of the beach and outside the manor. It’ll stop at nothing to keep you here, so all you can do is learn from your mistakes and get violent. Be the killer it wants you to be. Drink your sorrows away at a bar that can grant your new powers. Be transported to worlds beyond your own, learn the horrors that lie within, and come out a different man than you were before. You are the OTXO, and the OTXO shall stand amongst ruin.
Gameplay
If you’ve played Hotline Miami before or any top down shooter you should know what to expect from OTXO, but now it’s a roguelike. That means when you die you are transported to the first room of your run, and everything you just went through will be rearranged. New room layouts, different placement of enemies, progression through zones will be changed, and the different quirks introduced in each passing zone will be randomized. OTXO has this unique scaling system where upon entering a new zone enemies are given new deadly traits. Whether that be better reaction time, fiercer aiming, and much more. New enemies are introduced depending on what traits or zone you enter. To counter the overwhelming odds you have a wide variety of guns to utilize. Each one being of a different category, having different firing and reload rates, damage outputs, and range. News guns can be unlocked by finding dispensers throughout your journey, and before each run you can change what unlocked guns you do or don’t have access to during a run. Picked up guns will have two full ammo clips on them. The first being upon picking up the gun, but when you reload any ammo remaining in the first clip will be tossed aside. The second clip will be loaded and you can’t pick up any extra clips for the same gun even if they are on the floor. This encourages the player to constantly be switching out weapons. Toss aside guns that are running out of use, quickly pick up a new one, and keep the onslaught going. Enemies are always dropping weapons upon death, so you never run out of resources to rely on.
As a side option outside of guns you have a kick. If you kick an enemy they usually die within an instance, but it’s often risky as being swarmed in multiple directions gets you killed faster. By the way, you have a health bar in this game. It refills whenever you enter a new floor, and you can take this to your advantage by playing risky for a few batches of enemies. Tank a few bullets and when it gets to low start playing strategically. Another key aspect that sets OTXO apart from the game that inspired it is bullet time, otherwise Focus. Activating it allows you to slow down time. Being able to maneuver around enemy fire much easier, and get the drop on them. Focus has an energy bar tied to it, but it quickly refills so you aren’t discouraged on using it often. Whenever you kill an enemy you get coins, and coins can be spent at a bartender who pops up every few floors. More coins can be gained by keeping up a kill multiplier, and that multiplier goes up the more you kill enemies quickly. Coins allow you to purchase drinks, and these drinks grant you new powers and perks during each run. These drinks allow you to craft different builds during your journeys. Fire a bullet when kicking, knock down doors when rolling, restore small bits of health by absorbing blood flying through the air, enemy corpses exploding leading to fun chain reactions, and much more. Experiment and become overpowered as soon as possible, because the game ramps up in difficulty quickly. Outside of that there’s nothing else I can really say. OTXO has a fun combat loop and that’s it. Let’s hope you can kill the heart and make it to your love.
Thoughts
OTXO is a splendid spiritual successor to Hotline Miami that does enough to stand out by itself and refine the quirky gameplay elements that haven’t quite aged well with its inspiration. I don’t want to make this a competition between which is better, because I know a lot of people who will probably end up preferring Hotline Miami more for it’s impact on indie gaming or how art can be violent and still have a message. However, this is a review and everything I state is subjective. OTXO is the better game in my opinion, because even though the difficulty is whack later on the game is a very fun to play and easy to pick up. The game has a health bar which lets you tank a few bullets, but it’s not afraid to kill you quickly. If you aren’t careful you can die in a few shots, and that’s how the game keeps the frenetic combat loop of Hotline Miami. I love firing shots in one sector of a floor that doesn't alert every enemy in the vicinity. If you play wisely you can clear out rooms slowly, but play risky and you might burst open the door to another room and drag in more enemies to gun you down. I like the addition of bullet time, because it allows for chaotic scenarios to become manageable when used properly. Activate focus, lay down heavy fire, and roll out before enemy fire closes in.
All the guns you pick up feel great to use, and you can instantly pick up on their pros and cons by just using them in the field. The heavy thumping of a machine gun, the blast of a shotgun, or the sleek output of a submachine or silenced weapon. The audio is top notch and the gore is just delightful in a devilish way. The chaos that lays in your path and the sound of nothing but silence when you clear out a floor. Walking in the destruction you caused, and moving onto the next floor just to do it all over again. The soundtrack is a banger as as it bangs and eggs on for you to go kick some f*cking ass. This game has a fantastic combat loop and it’s good enough for me to give OTXO a recommendation. However, that’s about the best thing OTXO does. As much I love how it’s a more accessible Hotline Miami to me that doesn’t excuse its problems. Weird design choices and difficulty curves that are slowly diminishing my urge to beat this game. I like how OTXO gives enemies new traits and throws in new enemy types whenever you enter a new zone. It scales the difficulty to match your power and skill level, but sometimes it doesn’t do a good job at balancing everything out. Whether that be the sheer number of enemies in a single room, the strength they are given, or how you are given little time to adjust to a scenario. Dying in five seconds is fine when you know what killed you. Overwhelming odds, not as much but it’s fine.
The game has a monochromatic color palette and I don’t know if it entirely benefits from it. On one hand it’s easier to make out what’s in the environment, what you should shoot, and where a dropped gun is lying. On the other there’s still visual chaos and I hate how the health bar is clear. Sometimes you have a small fraction of health left, you try to determine how much, the blood on the ground covers it, and then you get shot to death in one hit. I wish there was an option to make the health bar a little more defined. The drinks offered by the bartender are enough to make each run feel refreshing, but I don’t think there’s good enough variety and purpose behind them. Some of them are just downright useless. Why would I need to see enemy health bars when they die within a few shots? Why would I want more coins per kill when the downside is that I have to pay for damage caused? Also I can just get more by keeping the multiplier up. Why get a small puddle of extra health but for decreased movement speed? The good drinks usually end up being the basic ones, and the best drinks are usually really expensive so trying to make a playstyle a tad bit more unique can be tricky, but still obtainable. The boss fights aren’t very good. They’re not poorly designed, but a game like OTXO or Hotline Miami doesn’t work very well with giant bullet sponges you gotta pump away at for a few minutes until they possibly die or you die.
This brings me onto my last complaint in that does OTXO benefit from being a roguelike? Yes & no. Again, this is a very addicting game but compared to other roguelikes I’ve played it doesn’t have enough variety or reason to keep pressing on. The only thing you keep between runs are the new drinks and guns unlocked. Even then you don’t have much choice on what you start with. The three starting drink choices are random. You always start with a bolt action rifle with eight bullets in a single clip. You always start with the same amount of health. I feel like it would’ve been better if OTXO had a second currency kept from runs similar to other roguelikes. It could be spent to improve maximum health, focus, defense, or maybe unlock a few different starting guns. I don’t think you should have access to all of them, but something better than the starting rifle. Room layouts and gimmicks get samey, you always encounter a specific boss at specific points with the only exceptions being the order of floors 2 through 4, and the difficulty curve either spikes to high due to imbalance scaling or falls flat with how much of a chore it is to go through the earlier areas. The game is difficult by design, I understand. However, you gotta ask yourself if what you're throwing at the player is one hundred percent good. OTXO is troubled in these few areas, but do remember I like this game. It’s good, worth checking out, and I had fun with it for the last few weeks I’ve dumped into it. If you like Hotline Miami or games like it this is a game I happily suggest. I am going to give OTXO an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
This critique was written by the single man at Review on. Stay tuned for more content and feel free to check more reviews out over at my site!
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