Superhot is an incredible bending of the first-person shooter genre that is dripping with style and puzzle solving satisfaction.
Superhot
Developer: Superhot Team
Price: $25
Platform: PC, (XB1 coming soon)
MonsterVine was provided with a Steam code for review.
The main concept of Superhot is simple to grasp: a first-person shooter in which time only moves forward when the player is moving. This drastically changes how the genre is played. Instead of a run and gun bloodbath, success requires slow, calculated approaches to each scenario. All it takes is one bullet to destroy an enemy, or to be destroyed yourself. Things start off with few enemies that don’t move and a lot of pistol action. The difficulty lies in situational awareness; knowing where your enemies are coming from and anticipating their movements. As another layer of challenge, all guns have a very limited ammunition count. This forces the player to be on a constant search for other weapons resulting in some badass moments: Pulling the trigger “IT’S OUT” flashes on screen. Throwing your empty gun at the nearest armed enemy, knocking their weapon into the air. Snatching the fresh gun out of the air and using it to dispatch remaining enemies: SUPERHOT!
There around 30 levels within the story of the game. Some can be completed on a first try, easily and under a minute. Others later in the game require players to use everything in their environment and have a firm grasp on where the enemies will be coming. The entire story mode took around 4 hours to complete and left me wanting more unique puzzles to solve. After the core game is finished, a few extra modes are unlocked. The challenge modes offer some slight modifications to the same set of story missions. Complete the game only using your fists, or where every gun only has one bullet. Unfortunately each of these modes have their own level progression, so if you want to jump around between different modes you are going to be replaying a lot of the early missions. The core section of levels is very strong, but replaying them with a slightly different play-style loses some of the magic. Endless mode is also unlocked after the story is finished, and this is my favorite post game content.
Superhot has a visual style that looks like a 1990s vision of a VR future. The enemies are all orange humanoid figures with strongly defined polygonal edges. The environments are bleak and simplistic, sometimes scattered with interactable black objects. The materialization of mechanics are all explained with giant words that fill the entire screen, and only flash for a brief moment. These moments are quick, vague and jarring. I loved every one of them. After every level is completed, a replay is automatically played back in realtime. These replays take the methodical, puzzled situations and transforms them into incredible scenes, ripped out of a blockbuster action film. Also during the replay the words SUPER and HOT are flashed and spoken in succession for the entire duration of the replay. I watched almost every replay, and even let them loop on a few occasions if only to soak in more of the style and marvel at my accomplishment. The stylized fast paced action paired with the absurd repetition of the game’s name is, simply put, rad.
The Final Word
Superhot is sizzling with style and mixes the first-person shooter and puzzle genres in a way that truly feels innovative. In every level the player choreographs a blockbuster movie’s action scene, rewarding them with the satisfaction of feeling like a badass at regular intervals. The lack of post game diversity is only disappointing because the core content and “dystopian VR retro-future” story is so hard to put down.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
