

SUPERHOT is a shooter, where you’re always in bullet time and a pretty innovative one at that. The developers have done well to not overcomplicate matters, leaving us with a game that’s hard to put down and always a joy to come back to.Hey, do you like extremely illegal games that your unnamed friend sent to you through your DMs? Well, you’ll love SUPERHOT! Do you need any more information than that? Well you’re better off in the dark. Superhot is a special game, based around a concept that is so simple and ingenius that it’s a wonder how no one has thought of it before.
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The ‘story mode’ is just a couple of hours long, but there’s plenty more to play through beyond that in the form of an endless mode, challenge rooms and time trials to give the game legs, plus Killstagram, which lets you compile your best runs and upload them online. You’ll also unlock the Hotswitch to swap bodies with one of your attackers, allowing for even more creative ways to clear a room. The meat of the game is its gameplay and the levels that are intricately designed and laid out to make multiple playthroughs fun. And it really wasn’t necessary, and so it’s all the more praiseworthy that the developers made the effort anyway. These interactions do little other than tie the game’s levels – which are more like short puzzles – together. It starts out with you chatting with a mysterious stranger, who gives you access to ‘superhot.exe’, a game that its makers don’t (yet) want you to play, and when you do, they aren’t happy. Superhot, as its surprisingly interesting story mode reveals, is a game within a game.

There are no soldiers in military fatigues, no terrorists to kill, no democracies to restore. Also missing is any semblance of reality. As fists and bullets rain down from all directions, you duck and weave out of their paths, all the while burying bullets in every foe in super slo-mo. You/Chow Yun-fat enter a room and find yourself outnumbered and outgunned. It’s only when you move quickly that everything around you moves fast, and herein lays the beauty of Superhot. See a bullet coming your way? Stop and take evasive action to slowly move away from its trajectory. But this isn’t your standard run-and-gun affair, because Superhot is as much about movement as it is about shooting, and it demands less reflexes and more strategic thinking.Īs long as you stay stationary, everything around you, from your enemies to their bullets, move so slow they almost seem motionless. In each of Superhot’s levels, awash in sterile white, you’re presented with any number of adversaries – bright-red indistinguishable crystalline characters – put there simply to hunt you down and take you out by any means necessary, from baseball bats to assault rifles. He who shoots first wins, but not in Superhot.

So what’s all the fuss about, you ask? Time moves when you move – with this simple core mechanic, Team Superhot (as the developer collective calls itself) has turned the first-person shooter genre on its head, deconstructing it to the point where Superhot is as much – if not more – a puzzle game as it is a shooter.įirst-person shooters are known for their twitchbased gameplay that rewards quick reflexes.
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What started out as the result of a game development challenge, quickly escalated into a full-fledged PC title that was successfully funded on Kickstarter. It’s rare that a group of individual game creators would band together especially for one project, but that only underlines how special Superhot is.
