OTXO Review: Max Payne Meets Hotline Miami In This Bloody Bullet Hell Ballet

OTXO is the blood-soaked Frankenstein’s Monster of a game I never knew I needed in my life. Developed by Lateralis Heavy Industries, it takes its inspiration from Hotline Miami, Max Payne, and The Binding of Isaac with its gruesome top-down action set to pumping synth tunes, stylish slo-mo gunplay, and grueling gameplay loop. While this combination may sound like a recipe for disaster, it works incredibly well, with each of these elements coming together effortlessly to create a blood-soaked, mesmerizing experience that demands your attention.

What A Mansion!

OTXO (pronounced oh-cho) puts players in the crisp black suit of a nameless protagonist in search of his lost lover. After waking up on a lonely beach with no recollection of how he got there, he ventures into a strange mansion to find her. But, unfortunately, it turns out the only way he can be reunited with his wayward sweetheart is by clawing his way to the heart of the estate and brutally butchering anything unlucky enough to cross his path.

Oh well, just like the old song goes: Love hurts, love scars. And believe me, you’re going to be doing plenty of those things during your time navigating OTXO’s monochrome nightmare world.

If you’ve ever played Hotline Miami before, you’ll have no trouble coming to grips with what OTXO expects of you. From how you control your movement with the left stick and rotate your character with the right, maneuvering your chrome-domed avatar feels pretty much exactly how it did in that game. Not only does OTXO handle like Hotline Miami, but the goal of each stage is a viscera-splashed carbon copy, as you’ll need to hunt down and kill every goon before moving on to the next area. There is a key difference, though. While Hotline Miami’s one-hit deaths were leveraged by giving the player unlimited attempts to clear a stage, instead, OTXO gives you a health bar but only a single life to make it through its murderous marathon.

And what a joy OTXO’s brand of mayhem is. Kicking in doors to send enemies flying across the room like a bloodied comet, then unloading a light machine gun into the faces of a gang of baddies to paint the room red feels nothing short of cathartic. Sure, the stages are pretty simple at first, with just typical cannon fodder grunts lurking about. However, it doesn’t take long before curve balls start flying your way. Bulky enemies hurl caustic chemicals that slow you down and drain your health, strange eldritch creatures slither about, and massive bosses lie in wait at the end of each area to test your mettle with devious attack patterns that will push you to the limits.

The Focus Factor

While my time running and gunning through OTXO’s black and white worlds certainly felt familiar, that’s not to say developer Lateralis Heavy Industries hasn’t done anything to shake things up to help the game stand on its own. As I mentioned before, your amnesiac protagonist just so happens to possess an extraordinary gift to help give players a fighting chance.

By pressing the right bumper, you can enter Focus Mode (OTXO’s version of Max Payne’s Bullet Time) to slow the action to a crawl. This skill allows you to weave in and out of waves of slugs and buckshot, almost as if you were playing a bullet hell shoot-’em-up. Focus Mode transforms OTXO’s tense encounters into a zen-like bullet ballet as you dance between volleys of gunfire and deal death with a staggering assortment of shotguns, sniper rifles, kunai, grenades, pistols, and more. Is it a mechanic we’ve seen done to death in the past? Absolutely. But it works so well here that you won’t care as you soak up each spectacular slo-mo shootout OTXO throws your way.

While Focus Mode is essential when blasting your way through the mansion’s eight different areas, it isn’t a win button. You can only slow down time briefly before it has to cool down. And once your Focus Gauge runs dry, you’ll find yourself at a tremendous disadvantage as you wait for it to replenish. That’s because your opponents are crack shots and can overwhelm you with dizzying speed and vastly superior numbers. That said, charging into a room guns-blazing without at least a bit of focus in your tank is akin to taking a ten-gallon whiz on an industrial-sized bug zapper.

Pick Your Poison

Another way OTXO shakes (and stirs) the action up is with its progression system. Every few floors will lead you to the mansion’s bar. Here, you can spend the cash you earn killing stuff to purchase drinks that bestow you with various perks. For example, the Smart Gun cocktail gives your bullets a 25% chance of homing in on your enemies, while the cleverly named Bloodweiser lets you replenish health by catching their blood droplets before they hit the ground. Of course, my personal favorite cocktail is Automation, which turns the guns you throw to the ground into automatic turrets, offering some welcome backup.

In addition to the bartender, a mysterious lady in the pub offers you a chance to invest any spare change into new drinks to stock the bar with. I loved the bar feature and quickly became addicted to dumping my cash into the various concoctions to see how they shaped the way I approached each run. If you enjoyed experimenting with the various abilities the RNG gods blessed you with in The Binding of Isaac, then OTXO’s killer cocktail menu is bound to get its hooks in you—so long as you can afford to pick up the tab, of course, as the most potent drinks will have you pinching your pennies just to afford them.

Of course, OTXO is a roguelite, so the buffs you purchase at the bar will be gone when you inevitably die a gory death and are sent to the beach to claw your way back to where you left off, but the drinks you’ve invested in will remain on the menu to purchase in future runs.

Gore, Noir, And A Dark Synth Score

OTXO’s presentation is superb. It features a gritty, monochrome style for the characters and environments, with the only other color being red for the gallons of blood that paint the scene of every showdown. It’s a striking aesthetic, and watching each stage go from pristine white to deep crimson as you mow down your attackers feels incredibly fulfilling, not unlike looking out at your lawn with satisfaction after a day of yard work.

My only complaint is that sometimes the monochrome visuals can make it tough to identify enemies in the thick of a firefight. When the floor is littered with broken black-clad bodies and buckets of blood, the two-tone visuals don’t do you any favors when trying to spot aggressors before they can get the drop on you.

If Hotline Miami’s pumping retrowave melodies did it for you, then you’ll likely love what OTXO offers on the aural front. The game features a phenomenal dark synth soundtrack composed by the game’s developer, Lateralis. It’s filled with stompy floor killers and atmospheric arrangements that are sure to get your adrenaline pumping. However, I noticed that sometimes tracks would repeat themselves only a stage or two apart, which was a little disappointing. Not because I didn’t like the song, but rather because the music was so good I was dying for more of it to enjoy.

Conclusion

If you’re a fan of Hotline Miami and roguelites, you owe it to yourself to add OTXO to your Steam library. While it’s true the busy visuals can occasionally lead to some frustrating deaths and the soundtrack repeats itself a bit too often, these minor gripes are easy to overlook when you consider just how much the game does right. Offering punchy and gratifying combat, a meaty challenge, and an addicting progression system that makes each loop feel fresh and exciting as you experiment with its engrossing perk system, OTXO will kick your ass and leave you begging for more.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available on: PC (reviewed); Publisher: Super Rare Originals; Developer: Lateralis Heavy Industries; Players: 1; Released: April 20st 2023; ESRB: N/A

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Dead Island 2 provided by the publisher.