So, Superhot is finally out and thanks to being on the Kickstarter campaign back in early 2014 I didn’t even have to go the long way through Steam to get it (I took the even longer route, I guess) 😉 But I have to say, it was well worth the wait.
Back then I first saw the teaser on Giantbomb more two years ago, that mix of being a first-person-shooter and a puzzle game was already extremely fascinating and I knew I’d really like to play this eventually. The finished game is even more a puzzler than I had expected. As with the demo, time is extremely slowed down when you’re not moving (looking around seems to speed time up by a little) so you can see where the enemies hidden in each level are shooting at.
Goal of every highly stylized black-and-white level is to take out all the red enemies. Most of the time you start without any weapon but your adversaries can have pistols, assault rifles, baseball bats, or (the highlight) katanas. You can get these from them by throwing things at them or taking the “reds” out via melee attacks. In the end every level looks like a choreography of you approaching a red, throwing something at him to get his weapon, taking out a couple others with that weapon until its empty, and repeat. The trick here is to find the right order and tactic to do that without being hit even once. You can also jump but - for some reason - this is only used once.
That gameplay is surrounded by a short and still well made story about hacking, addiction, but the star here is the time-mechanic. Once you’re done with the 2-3 hours of story, an endless-mode opens up which lets you use all the skills you’ve learnt to their absolute limit.
You might think that €20 for 2-to-3-hours campaign is quite a tough sell, but when combined with the endless-mode it is well worth it 😃 So far I’ve finished the campaign and a small chunk of the endless-mode and I can definitely see myself returning to this over and over again. The time-mechanic is just so great! Will I upload tons of stuff to killstagram.com? Most likely not, but don’t see that as an indicator that I’ve stopped playing 😉
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