Soon some Illuminati-like power begins to communicate to the player as they become hopelessly addicted to the game. The player receives the file superhot.exe from a friend, plays a bit of it, and quickly decides that it’s enjoyable but there’s not really much to the game. The game’s narrative also feels like it is padding out the experience. It took me about two-and-half hours to beat Superhot - meaning that I only found about an hour-and-change of the game that made good use of mechanics. That would be fine if the game was a little longer. When you go back and watch the footage of these fights, you wonder if Superhot’s mechanics were even necessary - could you have beaten that level if this were any old shooter? It’s not until some of the late game stages where you really have to commoditize your actions and time. I would miss shots, waste bullets, and make a muck of the whole experience - only to pass with flying colors. The biggest issue is a lot of the early to mid-game levels, which are pretty easy. I definitely appreciated Superhot’s creative mechanics and thoughtful action, but it doesn’t always deliver. The Superhot Team let you soak up your successful completion of a level by watching your action playout in real-time, so you can see how impressive your combat skills are. You’re pulling off complex actions in quick succession while surrounded by enemies. These little flourishes are a nice touch and add to the badass action-hero gameplay. Some melee weapons can be thrown to kill enemies, like the katana. If you run out of bullets, the best strategy is to throw your gun at an enemy in order to stun and disarm them. When you time these attacks right, the enemy will often throw the gun in the air, allowing you to catch it. You almost never start with a gun in Superhot, meaning you’ll have to disarm an enemy through punching them or throwing an object at them. There’s enough cool twists to the gameplay that make the game more than dodging bullets and lining up kill shots. You know those slow motion firefights from your favorite action movies? The scenes where the enemy has the hero surrounded with guns pointed at them, ready to fire, yet somehow the hero always escapes, gets a weapon, and takes everyone out? That’s the feeling Superhot is trying to recreate.Īnd does so fairly well.
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Superhot forces players to think about how they use each second and how to keep time moving while avoiding enemy fire.
This is where the puzzle aspect comes in. You’ll still have to line up shots and anticipate enemy movement, but the encounters of Superhot would be impossible to most people in real-time - especially in the later levels where you might start with a gun pointed at your head.
In many ways, shooters and puzzle games have some common threads and Superhot explores these threads through its time-based structure. That’s because Superhot is only half of a shooter, wrapped up in a puzzle game. It’s what sold the game to backers and its creative gameplay set it apart from other shooters. The mechanics are everything in Superhot.