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Murder Inc on PS5
At first glance, Murder Inc from PigeonDev feels like a match made in indie-shooter heaven — a blend of Hotline Miami’s pulsing ultraviolence and Superhot’s frozen-in-time precision. The setup is enticing: time only moves when you do, forcing you to plan every step through rooms crawling with armed enemies.
Unfortunately, what sounds like a tense, strategic ballet quickly unravels into a frustrating, uneven experience that rarely rewards skill or patience.
A Story That Starts Strong, Then Trips Over Itself
You play as Anderson, a hitman with a mysterious past and a knack for getting into bad situations. The story opens at what seems to be the end, before flashing back ten days to reveal how things went wrong. It’s a decent framing device that could’ve built intrigue — if not for the clunky dialogue and uneven pacing that rob it of any punch.
Each mission unfolds across multiple short stages, with the primary objective of eliminating all enemies before proceeding. Occasionally, a level throws in a gimmick — a wide-open arena, some exploding barrels, or a new weapon — but the novelty fades fast. By the third or fourth chapter, the rhythm collapses into dull repetition, with only minor variations to break the monotony.
Botched Execution
The heart of Murder Inc should be its tight gunplay and deliberate tempo. Instead, its systems fight against you. Enemies have near-perfect awareness and snap to your position the moment you edge into their line of sight. Planning feels futile when even the slightest mistake ends with instant death — especially since many maps are sprawling and empty, forcing you to repeat long sequences over and over to reach the same fatal corner.
Worse still, there’s no way to quit mid-stage without restarting the entire mission. If frustration sets in (and it will), your only options are to finish the level or throw your controller. It’s a baffling design choice that makes what’s already a punishing experience feel downright hostile.
Precision is everything in a game like this, and Murder Inc fumbles it spectacularly. The crosshair floats freely across the map, which helps with scouting ahead. That is, until it drifts so far off-screen that you lose track of it entirely. There’s no way to snap it back to your character or lock it at a fixed range, meaning you’ll spend half your time wrangling the reticle instead of pulling off clever plays.
The deadzone on both analogue sticks appears to be set to zero, causing even the slightest controller drift to send your aim veering unpredictably. On PS5, that’s a recipe for disaster. It feels like a PC control scheme lazily transplanted to console, with none of the fine-tuning that would make it playable.
Weapons Without Weight
Murder Inc features seven weapons, though only four show up regularly, and they all feel almost identical. The shotgun sprays pellets, the pistol and rifle are near-interchangeable, and the sniper rifle’s limited ammo makes it effectively pointless. Only the SMG stands out thanks to its bouncing bullets, which can ricochet off walls to hit enemies hiding around corners. It’s the one mechanic that genuinely feels satisfying, even if those moments are rare.
Melee combat, meanwhile, might as well not exist. It requires you to drop your gun first, which is suicidal against enemies that can kill you in a blink. With no dedicated melee button and unreliable range detection, it’s a system that feels half-implemented and quickly abandoned.
Bugs, Bland Maps, and Dead Air
If the poor design doesn’t wear you down, the technical flaws will. On several occasions, I got stuck in walls just by sliding too close, a fatal glitch when survival depends on cover. Combined with large, visually repetitive maps and enemies that all look and move the same, Murder Inc’s presentation starts to feel unfinished.
The visuals themselves are passable, though the colour palette makes it hard to tell where your gun ends and corpses begin. The soundtrack, disappointingly, lacks the pulse and energy that made Hotline Miami so unforgettable. Within an hour, I’d turned the volume down and queued up my own playlist instead, which is never a good sign.
A Missed Shot
There’s a genuinely clever idea buried inside Murder Inc — one that could’ve fused methodical gunfights with twitch-reflex action in a unique way. But with its floaty controls, punishing restarts, and lack of polish, it never manages to deliver on its promise.
Even the things that work — like ricochet shots or stylish kill chains — are fleeting flashes of what could have been. Instead of sharpening its mechanics, Murder Inc settles for a hollow imitation of its inspirations. It’s the kind of game that makes you long to replay Hotline Miami, just to remember how good this formula can be when done right.
Murder Inc is available now on PC, and will release on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 on October 22.
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Summary
Murder Inc wants to place itself up there with top-down action games like Hotline Miami, but it doesn’t quite have the right level of precision or polish to make that happen. While the time mechanics are interesting, they wear out quickly in a game that lacks variety and raises frustration much more than adrenaline.
