The Hong Kong Massacre Review (Commissar)
I got this on a sale so I am reviewing it within the view of "if I had gotten it for full price."
Gameplay wise, a good portion of this game is teetering on feeling broken. I'm sure someone more familiar with these kinds of shooters can give you the particulars of it on a mechanical level but it feels bad. Movement is either slow, janky, or jerky with a too-short camera distance that makes it genuinely difficult on a lot of the cut and paste maps. After about 30 minutes I feel like I've seen all I need to see and I think if this game was half the price and half as long it'd be a fun little Hotline Miami clone that somehow took a lot of the bad level design attributes of HM2 and decided that really needed doubling down on. The boss fights are also abysmal - the fact that this sort of game has boss fights is a neat idea, a nice iteration on the concept, but they're just spammy spongy bullet hells along the same set corridors.
The PC controls being what they are, the menus themselves are equivalently janky and pretty consistently don't regard key inputs. You may find yourself furiously clicking or tapping the key inputs that the menu asks for (sometimes they're just broken and it shows a controller button for some reason) and realize that, no, you were a silly billy you you must active do the other. I couldn't find a specific rhyme or reason for it but... alright, I guess.
The music also is laughably bad. It just sucks, it doesn't fit the vibe of the game at all and seems to actively make it worse. Whoever composed the music has a hard-on for the bass guitar and that is perfectly fine but maybe something with a little soul? It reminded me most of a generic arcade cabinet's START screen music where a demo is playing. I'm sure if that was the intent then they've done a wonderful job but its so forgettable I gotta laugh.
Speaking of forgettable: if you ever wondered what Hard Boiled would be like if all the dime-a-dozen knock-offs from the era were even less inspired and sanded down into a smooth, unoffensive, and poorly delivered series of badly written exposidumps then you're in for a treat: that is 100% of this game's story. I had thought at first I was in for something moodier and more interpretive thanks to some genuinely striking and odd cutscenes (with awful audio mixing, whoops!) but those are quickly swept away in place of a banal police interview tossed through Google translate and a conversation in a bar that is genuinely so soulless that I'm sure at least part of it was written by someone banging their meat on a keyboard.
Slow motion and diving also feel extremely bad. The indications of the player character doing either are so miniscule and presumptive and get lost the moment you're doing anything. The overall bland visual design does also mean that you will get stuck on terrain quite often largely through no fault of your own and the dodge mechanic is flatly broken - if you're not careful you WILL phase through walls and get stuck on terrain. Thankfully restarting a run is kind've the whole idea of this sub-genre of shooter but it feels really, really half-baked and underdeveloped. It also eventually adds in an enemy that is just annoying - one that always dodges the first shot, even and especially when you get the drop on them. I'm sure that it felt good on paper but considering they visually have a kevlar vest on I feel like if they were just bulletproof for one shot it would've felt a lot less like I was playing something uninspired and cheaply made.
A few things that this game does right is visual flair during combat, weapon balancing, and weapon upgrades. Each weapon feels genuinely unique and upgrading them is both worthwhile and mechanically rewarding. Massively, massively rewarding. The exploding cabinets, windows, doors, and bloody viscera are all on-brand for the movies and TV shows its emulating, too,
Overall, The Hong Kong Massacre feels generic. Its standard, B-rate, and fine but its not much more than that. If you're a fan of Hong Kong action flicks of the 1990's then this won't scratch an itch but if you like Hotline Miami and really want more of that then you could do a lot worse than this. For someone like me who loves the former and is not a fan of the latter's trial-and-error-or-go-suck-yourself gameplay I genuinely don't recommend it unless it's on sale. If my complaints feel unrelateable and you're good with a heaping of jank then don't let me stop you, it just clearly isn't for me.