Hotline Miami
BANGER · Shooter · 2012
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 5.2h
- Value
- $1.92/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, DirectX 8-compatible graphics card with at least 32MB of video memory, 246 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Hotline Miami is a high-octane action game overflowing with raw brutality, hard-boiled gunplay and skull crushing close combat.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $0.99, set in June 2026. 100 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 15 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 4 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Turbo Overkill ($5.99, scores 94) beats it on value, while it beats Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number ($14.99, scores 79).
The press gave it 85; the people who bought it give it 97 percent. A 12-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 38 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 13 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 622 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 87 percent of the 9,972 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 9 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 5.2 hours. Doing everything runs 15, 2.9 times as long.
The rating rests on 128,126 reviews, so it is not going to move much from here.
At 5.2 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
80% start to 38% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
404 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Honestly, one of the best indie games ever made. 10/10. Wait, my phone is ringing, let me check who it is... They said they have a babysitting job for me? Gotta go
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Hotline Miami scores 85/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/219150/hotline-miamiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.