![]() The first level starts in a L-shaped hallway. Simple and clean graphics clash with the hardcore, dirty action SUPERHOT delivers in a hypnotizing way. This simple premise can be manipulated in so many ways, allowing for a short but sweet ~20 level campaign, ~20 level challenges, and an infinite shootout mode with ~5 challenges and arenas. SUPERHOT is a fast-paced FPS where time only moves when you move. Three years, a full team and a gallon of shoe polish later, the game has been remade as a downloadable title for console and PC. In 2013, a small group of friends put out a scrappy little game made for web browsers. And I don't like the interface either, maybe some people don't remember that MS-DOS sucks. There is no music aside from the ending credits, which ironically has awesome music. The art is drab and minimalistic, the entire world is painted with a boring shade of white and all the enemies look the same. The story is a generic and pretentious cyberpunk parable that interrupts you constantly with boring text dumps. The non-gameplay elements are fairly weak too. And the game would also be a lot more hard if the enemies were accurate, while playing the game I constantly found myself saved by an enemy missing shots in a hilarious fashion. There is also very little enemy variety, all the enemies have the same shape and are only differentiated by the weapons they carry, this also makes it harder to know what weapon an enemy is carrying which only adds unnecessary confusion (which easily leads into more trial and error). So it's a very restrictive game which forces you into using it's gimmicks by having a lot of constraints. The game also has this annoying tendency of constantly putting you in very vulnerable situations with no starting weapons, meaning you have to throw objects at enemies or use melee before you can grab a gun (I found this extremely annoying after a short while), to make things worse guns have very few bullets forcing you into having to steal weapons from enemies constantly (since more ammo would make the game very easy). Also enemies constantly spawn at multiple points in the map (usually behind you) with no warning so it's very easy to get yourself into a killing zone, the only way to prevent this is to have already played the level, so this leads into a lot of trial and error gameplay (most shooters have grown past this already). Still I would admit I found Superhot to be a bit enjoyable.īut the game has other problems in a lot of different areas, for one thing most levels are extremely small and don't give you a lot of freedom of movement. This kind of gameplay might still appeal to some people, although I suspect this applies mainly to people who aren't big fans of shooting games in the first place. All this excitement dissipates as soon as you get a button to slow-down time, and it gets even worse when slow-motion is the default state, so Superhot gameplay is kinda boring and this is extremely noticeable during replays in which actions tend to look fairly unimpressive when played at a normal speed. Slow motion perception is a real thing you can feel in any good action game, during an emergency your brain can process a lot of information extremely quickly, you perceive time to be slower and your can react faster than normal. And the slowdown also shows another problem with the bullet-time mechanic: it's boring. Superhot doesn't dodge this problem, in fact it's a perfect showcase of it since you have less control of bullet time than in other shooters, you are far more restricted: When you are standing still time moves very slowly and time only moves normally when you move, meaning you cannot do something as simple as jumping in slow-motion. ![]() So what most games do is slow down the speed of bullets quite significantly so that they end up with guns that are unsatisfying to use, since they fire very slow bullets, and projectiles that are still so fast that cannot be reliably dodged at short range. In order to see a bullet moving you would need to slow down time by an insane amount, far beyond anything you see in any game with a bullet-time mechanic. ![]() Most people don't realize how insanely fast bullets are in real life, the average speed of a bullet is double the speed of sound (around 750 meters per second). ![]() However let's not confuse slow-motion with bullet time, these are two very different things and there are many games that have made great use of slow-motion like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Bullet time sucks, it has always sucked, it has sucked ever since Max Payne introduced it and very few games have managed to make it work.
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