The Hong Kong Massacre Review (bobbins)
Not a bad game. In fact, at its best moments, it's quite addictive and feels really cool to play - like Hotline Miami meets the Matrix. It's a shame that those moments get less and less frequent. Though the mechanics all work quite well most of the time (stressing *most*, random enemy dodge rolls and clipping are quite big problems) and there's nothing capital w "Wrong" with the way this is put together, I found the game was getting really tedious toward the end. This is partially due to the reuse of the same environments again and again, partially due to the lack of much musical variation at all (the game has about 4, serviceable but awful after you've heard em for a while, tracks in total), partially due to the goddawful story (not what anyone is here for, I know, but it doesn't help), and partially due to the seemingly random difficulty of levels. Although only running to 5 hours, this combined made me really not like the last 2 of those hours.
The "progression" systems aside from just finishing levels break this game, requiring at least two playthroughs of every level (one where you don't miss a single shot, and one where you don't use slow mo - you're never going to manage both at once), and fundamentally making the game not that fun to play. Everything is too fast to comprehend without slow-motion, and shooting entirely accurately removes all the spectacle from the game entirely. Very bad design decision.
All in all, there is a really good core game here, that can be really satisfying to play. Everything wrapped around it is either really badly thought through, or really frustrating after a while (though this is probably a budgetary constraint). As I had such a frustrating end to my playthrough, I can't recommend.