It's surprising that a game like The Hong Kong Massacre hasn't been done before: a bloody, top-down twin-stick homage to violent Hong Kong cinema -- more-specifically the visual-affluence of influential director John Woo. There may have been games that offered the same triad elements, but none of its over-the-top bullet-bathed totality.
It's surprising that a game like The Hong Kong Massacre hasn't been done before.
It's a bloody, top-down twin-stick homage to violent Hong Kong cinema – more-specifically the visual-affluence of influential director John Woo. There may have been games that offered the same triad elements, but none of its over-the-top bullet-bathed totality.
As such, the game already garners point for originality, although it may have benefited from a more variable game play and it has difficult sections that feel more frustrating than fun to play through.
The game's best elements relate to their Woo-heavy sense of glorious violence. The sense of near-cartoonish chaos is constant, with bullets, enemies, pieces of broken windows and walls endlessly filling the screen alongside decrepit locations ripe for 1990s action acrobatics.
Indeed, the characteristic Woo slow-motion shoot-outs are a major component of the game, literally being one of the main character's powers.
The closest cousin of the game is the 2012 shooter Hotline Miami, which serves up most of the same mechanics.
Like that game, Massacre basks in the same sense of constant threat, rarely letting players take a breather, similar to the ultra-busy scrolling shooters of the early 1990s arcade scene, such as Raiden.
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