SUPERHOTIT’S THE MOST INNOVATIVE SHOOTER I’VE PLAYED IN YEARSCool is an understatement when it comes to SUPERHOT. The concept sounds simple enough. Shoot some red guys into tiny, shattered pieces. The kicker is that time only moves when you move, making strategy, timing, and finesse all key factors in the core of the gameplay. When I first booted up SUPERHOT, I thought “Well this is cool.” As I progressed, the thought changed to “really cool.” After chaining attacks, snatching guns, and blasting away bad guys for hours and hours, all I can say is this game is REALLY f*cking cool. The title is without a doubt one of the most insanely satisfying concepts I have seen come out of a first person shooter in the recent years, and is packed with options worth replaying.
As I mentioned before, time only moves when you do. Transitioning to this style of movement and planning can be difficult at first when many are used to the fast paced offerings of Call of Duty and other big names in the genre. After getting your mind around it, it is an absolute blast to play. It is extremely rewarding to play through a level with a certain flow, nailing shots to perfection. Fans of Hotline Miami will resonate with the feel of the game, as it almost plays like a first person version of it. As you play the short but oh so sweet “story” mode, you’ll dodge bullets and return plenty of your own in various satisfying ways.
Looking in from outside, SUPERHOT is an oddity to watch, one that truly needs to be played to fully be understood. You can literally walk past a bullet and get closer to your target. If unarmed and you happen to time it right, you can pull off a chain attack where you melee the enemy, grab their weapon straight out of the air, and turn said weapon on them. It rocks to do this, and when the level comes to a close you can see all your movements in full speed. You can even HOTSWITCH, which lets you transfer bodies with an enemy. This is great for getting out of tight situations, as well as getting an easy “kill.” SUPERHOT is oddly strategic, making it even more challenging in the long-run.
SUPERHOT is kind of an out of body experience. The story see’s you, the player, playing an illegally cracked game called SUPERHOT. In what is an apparent virtual reality experience, you the player gets sucked into SUPERHOT beyond your control. It’s hard to explain, but it speaks to the nature of and evident future of gaming in some ways, with the newly developed realm of VR just now starting to flourish. You come to realize that you have no choice but to play SUPERHOT, and that something or someone is watching, controlling, and taunting you. While the narrative is not weak by any means, it could have used a little more substance, but what I experience with my time in the game has me hopeful for a sequel down the line. In the meantime, the title packs plenty to do when the story is all said and done.
Featuring both an endless mode and challenging mode in addition to the story, there is a lot of bang for your buck. Endless mode reimagines and revisits multiple levels from the base game and lets you fight endless waves of red guys until you are killed off. The game truly shines here, because it becomes an obsessive objective to not only master your skills but also to beat your previous scores. With three different guns and a variety of throwables/melee objects, there is a lot of ways these matches can play out. In the challenge mode, you basically replay all of the combat levels from the base story with different variations in place. The first challenge sees the player only able to use a katana as their weapon, nothing else. You get a speed bonus, which changes the dynamic of how you will play. Other challenges, like the SPEEDRUN challenge, has you racing against the clock which will test your skills to the fullest. There are a handful of maps in the endless mode which feature their own variations as well, making SUPERHOT jam packed with post-story play.
I love this game, there is no other way to put it. It bleeds awesome, I mean I sliced a freaking bullet in half before throwing my katana at the shooter. It does not get much cooler than that. The story is totally up to interpretation, but really resonated as an out of body experience that I have not seen in many other games. I just want to keep playing, which is ironic because that is almost verbatim to what your character is forced to say in game. SUPERHOT just works extremely well, and is such a dynamic concept that others need to experience. The team behind SUPERHOT deserves high praise for bringing this self-aware, ultra-cool shooter to the masses.
9/10
+Ultra-cool Concept
+Rewarding
+Lots of options
-Story and Concept may feel obscure to some
4.5