SUPERHOT

You pay 23 euros to play less than 2 hours. Game that is base on one cool time-effect, with no "graphics", no actual music and plot with more holes than you have bullets. No. Just no.

SUPERHOT is little more than a proof-of-concept. The levels are tiny, usually one or two rooms with nooks and crannies. The game spawns enemies all around you in a somewhat random fashion, which then immediately start converging on you. You try to shoot them before they shoot you. That's all there is really. The claim that time only moves when you move, is a lie. It always advances, though slowly. This may not seem like a big problem, but you are basically always being shot at from some direction, and taking the time to look around means giving the bullets time to reach you. So how do you know where the enemies are? You often don't. As a result, there is no intelligent tactical way to play this game. It is just a big exercise in trial and error and hoping that you guessed correctly where the newest enemy has spawned. At least that's how it feels in the hard levels, of which there actually are very few; the vast majority is very easy. The plot is as pretentiously "meta" and "fourth wall breaking" as can be. The game has *massive* physics and clipping issues. Sometimes enemies shoot through walls. Often you try to shoot around a corner, but the bullet collides with the wall even though it shouldn't; in hard levels this typically results in death. Sometimes enemies accidentally pulverize their weapons when they walk too close to a wall. Thrown away weapons often somersault or glide around the floor absurdly. To summarize, the game does very little, and what it does, it does badly. There is simply no reason to play this, except maybe for the interesting visual design of both the game itself and the menus.

The flow is unnatural, enemy shots lead you spot on every time if you aren't changing your direction whenever they fire. There's no dodging under a bullet. There's no leaning. It feels like you might as well be a pillar on tank treads. If your feet aren't planted on the ground, everything moves in real time. So no mid-air slow motion either. You're not really making use of the slow motion to stay alive, because there's no stray bullets in the air to watch out for. Every bullet is in the air to punish you if you aren't stopping on a dime every so often to change direction. I was hoping for something that could side with F.E.A.R. and Max Payne for fantastic slow motion action and movie-like shootouts. Instead I got the feeling I was just exploiting my character's lack of momentum. Playing the full game I can't shake the feeling that the devs seems to have spent all the time since their playable demo, on making killstragram; the cool terminal interface and all its' extras; and an interesting at best plot. Rather than expand on the gameplay we all got excited for in its' early stages. I think the game would've fared better had they just given us the levels and gameplay, but at half the price.

Pros: - Interesting mechanics with time. - Game length is just good. Longer would have been too much. (Game mechanics are not that good, that you would like to spend countless hours in the game). - Art is simplistic but really nice. Cons - Feels more like technological demo than full game. - Overpriced for such a short indie game ( get it when on discount ). There is a lot of games on GOG in similar price range with far better price / content ratio.

In the beginning, SUPERHOT is very intriguing, the unique slow motion feature is fun and stylish. But even in the first few levels, something gets in the way of that style: After finishing a level, a replay is shown... While alternatingly flashing the words "SUPER" and "HOT" on the entire screen, getting in the way of the otherwise stylish view. But if nothing else, the "story" kept me going, because there are hints at something deeper. Later though, it's revealed, that there's really nothing there. Nothing really changes throughout the game. There is one ability being introduced later on, but otherwise everything's the same, and then it just ends. But the worst of all is, in the later levels, you keep being surrounded by enemies, and as turning around makes the enemies move, winning these levels really comes down to luck, that you're not shot in the back. At most, this game is worth a quarter of the actual asking price. I'm glad I bought it as a special offer, and I'm still a bit disappointed I got it at all. I don't think I'll ever buy the DLC I bought alongside it.