Since you die from a single bullet, the latter is extremely important. The two main reasons for this are the eye-catching visuals and good controls. Sure, the gameplay isn't especially deep, but what's there kept drawing us back every time we turned the game off in frustration after a single bullet from an enemy ended our near-perfect run. Maybe these moments were lost on us, but the action itself is something entirely different. We put cinematics in quotation marks because they're mostly disjointed close-ups of a character's face or a shadowy figure standing in the distance not exactly Oscars material. These short, text-filled sequences are mixed in with a few often-repeated 'cinematic' sequences. Most of the story is told through flashbacks, as our acrobatic friend is mostly sitting in an interrogation room explaining why the city is filled with dead gangsters and buildings with more holes in them than a sieve. What makes the narrative a bit stale is how it's presented. You've heard it before an ex-cop is out for revenge against the triads who killed his partner. Those of you who are looking for a game that delivers both in terms of story and gameplay can remove The Hong Kong Massacre from your list right now, but the good news is that it's because of the story, not gameplay.

Let's make it simple by saying not quite, but there's obviously more to it. The only question is, can it live up to its inspirations? That's why it shouldn't be especially surprising that The Hong Kong Massacre - the first game from the tiny Swedish studio called Vreski - planted itself right in the middle of our radar when it was unveiled back in 2017. We really like Max Payne, we adore Stranglehold, and we keep going back to Hotline Miami even if it continues to make us throw our controller at the wall.

The hong kong massacre gameplay