Well hello there, folks! We’ve got a fresh game review for you. This time it’s a first-person shooter, that turns into strategy thanks to the gameplay particular qualities - Superhot. It came out on February 25th in 2016, for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. The game sets the player in a minimalistic environment, taking out hostile attackers that are trying to kill you.
Those mentioned particular qualities are the ability of in-game time to stop when you don’t move, so that is the reason why the shooting game turns into a strategy: you look for correct paths, plan the queue of kills and the weapons to grab. Now let’s make a sum up on every aspect that are inherent in any of the video games.
SUPERHOT review: Story
You begin with the innocent and friendly conversation in a chat, where you discuss the game and your friend sends you a file superhot.exe, suggesting to play it. Typical situation, right?
Later you start noticing some weird stuff going on: the game begins to glitch a lot, your snug conversation with a friend turns out to be a chat with a virus. Then the game itself starts a dialogue with you, and you continue walking down the weird hallway and looking at a fictionalized version of yourself sitting in front of the DOS prompt (spoilers!).
Actually, you’ve got to kill all the bad guys, every other thing will be discovered while playing. Let’s keep the intrigue.
SUPERHOT review: Graphics and music
These two are so minimalistic, and their symbiosis is perfect. All the characters are very fragile, literally. If it was a real life - they would be made of glass, because the sounds that you hear when you hit an enemy is exactly the sound of broken glass.
Developers included random pixelated glitches to the game at the end of each level, that seems pretty nice and accords with game stylistics. There’s nothing excess in the game, so it looks nice and cozy enough as for a game when you're going to get killed a few times.
SUPERHOT review: Controls
The controls are pretty easy, the standard WASD combination, space as jump, R to restart (you will need this one, I’ve checked) and the mouse to move your head around and to shoot.
SUPERHOT review: Gameplay
As I said, everything in this game is fragile. You’re especially fragile because it takes you to get one kick to be knocked down while your enemies need three ones. Taking a single hit from an enemy’s bullet kills you, and you must restart the level. When someone of the enemies is about to appear you will see the red light burning around the doorway, that will help you find out what to do.
Weapons. You can use a handgun, a shotgun and a machine gun. Also, you can use melee weapons, and improvised weapons like billiard balls and bottles that can be thrown at the enemies. You don't pick up a weapon automatically when you pass over it, but you must enact a specific control to do so. That’s how you choose and use weapons, or grab weapons as they fall out of opponent's hands.
Pro-tip :) It will take you 4-5 levels to get used to this game. The only thing you should remember is not to hurry, you’d better take your time. It won’t be good for you to run as you’re playing CoD, CS or any other shooter. Superhot gives you a possibility to see the trajectory of a bullet, so you could dodge it.
The level where I’ve felt the necessity to stop and think a little bit was the one with an elevator: you’re inside with three guys, two of them are armed with handguns. When the elevator arrives to the right floor there are two more guys waiting for you with a shotgun and a machine gun. One wrong move and you’re dead! I suppose that level might be the line between the easy and the hard ones, but it’s not enough to reduce the contrast between them. Probably, the contrast was made on purpose to confuse the gamer, and I’m sure you won’t be distracted too much. Keep calm and move step by step.
The general impression of the game is quite positive, I can’t call it’s too hard because you finish the level before you turn on the rage mode. But still it makes you think of the pathway that will kill all the enemies instead of you. Our team would rate Superhot 9 / 10.
