With PlayStation's sudden emergence as the darling of indie games producers everywhere, it's good timing for a truly outstanding title to turn up on its digital shelves.
Enter Hotline Miami.
(Well, enter, shoot, bludgeon, die, repeat, and so on.)
Hotline Miami (PS3/PS Vita, £6.49) is a near straight conversion of the title which was released on PC in 2013, and which from screenshots or description alone might not sound that appealing.
Essentially, this is the on-foot missions from Grand Theft Auto meets Super Hexagon. An extremely fast, difficult and twitchy action puzzler, the aim is to enter a top-down network of rooms and corridors, and kill everything as swiftly and brutally as possible - without being killed yourself.
Unfortunately getting deaded is ridiculously easy in this world of insta-skull crushes, bonus-conferring animal masks and jittery rifles. And thus the repetition, frustration and ultimately ridiculous fun that quickly emerges and swallows up hours of your time.
Both ports are technically excellent, with finely tuned controls and retro-ish visuals. But it's on the PS Vita where the game really excels. The addition of the touchscreen to choose targets and scroll the map is useful and intuitive, while the closeness of the screen and excellent speed is also perfect for the game. This wouldn't work on the 3DS, but it works brilliantly on the Vita.
Most of all, Hotline Miami has always been a game that you want to pick up, throw down and pick up again immediately after. On a console this is tricky, and involves broken TVs. On the Vita, while playing on the Tube, the commute or at the office for a sneaky five-minute session, it works brilliantly.
Hotline Miami is the work of two people - Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, plus the conversion work of Abstraction Games - and it's better than virtually any game you can already get for the PS Vita. It's horrifically violent, bloody, beautiful, insane fun of the highest quality. If you missed it on PC, get it right now.
