SUPERHOT

Superhot. I don't know. I played this game pretty much right after it came out since I was curious about it, the concept sounded fun. After I did complete it I kind of had a grimace on my face, because the meta elements of this game will either work for you and you'll find them very charming, or, like me you won't really enjoy them. Anyway, just recently Steam was recommending I play it, so I decided to play it over again, and I beat it to see if I liked it any better. And, well, no, my opinion is pretty much as it was 10 years ago. It's remarkable, it's actually been pretty much exactly 10 years, since the game came out in 2016. So... Super Hot. Or, Superhot. I refuse to all-caps the word since I just can't say it with the gusto they want me to. I beat this game in about 90 minutes, and that includes spending some time idling on the main menu. It's a game where... well. It feels very... I don't know. They want to be like a Hotline Miami or something, where you have these levels, where you're dropped into a scenario, and you gotta kill all the dudes. You don't really have weapons as such like in Doom or any traditional shooter, you just pick random guns up, empty the magazine, throw it away when you're done. You pick up objects, throw them at enemies or whatever to distract or disorient them so you can melee them or whatever. That's pretty much the whole game, I've just described the whole thing. So much for 'the most innovative shooter I've played in years' - I was able to describe it lazily just by describing a different game. The perspective is different, in games like Hotline Miami (I would compare that game to some Flash games that came before, personally, Hotline Miami is just a very nicely polished version in a slightly better engine than Flash), you see from a top down bird's eye perspective. This game is first person. However, I would argue that's actually a huge problem in this game, and coupled with the fact that enemies always are constantly teleporting in or coming at you from around a corner or something and you never see it coming? I actually kind of didn't really enjoy this game as much as I should have. Superhot, is not nearly as fun as it really 'should' be and I think a big part of that is... You really should get wallhacks in this game. That's a weird thing to suggest, but I think it would have helped a lot. It's way too often you get blindsided by guys you didn't know were there. Compare to say, Katana Zero. You can basically get a pretty good idea of the entire level just by looking around? You never really get blindsided and that's the same sort of game here. Ostensibly, a fast-twitch game where you kill enemies in one shot but you die too, in one hit. Anyway. I think that at the time, people probably would have abhorred the idea of actually making the game easier in the sense of letting you just 'see' where enemies are - but guess what? It not only would have been a cool effect, it would have been a great way to help identify where the last few enemies are, all in a game that seems to WANT to make you feel cool, when in actuality you're often stuck restarting multiple times on levels. And that's not fun. I also don't think the game is really... difficult, either, really. It's not a hard game. I am sure the challenges and endless mode and stuff do get hard! The game invites you strongly to check those out after you beat the 'main game'. But I'm not gonna do that. I don't think that the format the game provides is actually a very good one for the type of combat that it wants to provide, I think that the control you have over time is so much more limited than it really should be, and there's lots of what I would consider problems with the game too. Everything to do with 'jumping' for example is just a mess. That's a very strange thing to complain about, but basically you jumping in this game, is absurdly terrible. You just have this weird hop, and unless you're HOLDING jump, time passes at a normal rate? Which is bizarre. The jump also is so quick that feels... well, just terrible. That's a strange complaint maybe, but I've played a lot of FPS games and I've played games without jump buttons, and games with weird awkward jumps and games with good jumps and air controls, and this game is not one of the latter. I suspect they didn't want the player to be able to duck because you will eat bullets to the mouth constantly in this game, and if you could duck, maybe once in a while you could avoid them. Maybe they had trouble figuring out how to make a good crouch that felt smooth and didn't make your hitboxes too advantageous, or something, because going along with the jump feeling awkward, moving and shooting and many of the animations and such associated really quite primitive. Not that this has to be on the level of Death Stranding, it's an indie game from 2016, but I dunno. That's just one of those things I notice that makes me feel, yep, amateur. I also wanna talk briefly about the cost of this game. Since its release I thought this game was hella expensive for no good reason. I can't really go around telling people what their game is worth, but I am just saying I would not pay $35 AUD for this game. I also don't know where all that money went, since... did they even do anything else after this game released? Did they just stop? I mean, I guess if I made a couple million I'd probably just stop too. Anyway, to get back to the game. I just can't say I really loved this game, or even wanted to like it. The game is just so... cocky and self-assured in a bad way that it felt like, the game was made by marketing people who knew how to build a flashy-looking trailer to hook people in, but then you play the game and you're just kind of let down by it being just an OK experience. I think I'm gonna say I don't recommend it. I had an OK time, so if you were looking at this game in your library and you were like, oh hey, Superhot. I remember that game. I should play it, finally. Well, I guess you can. It's not a totally painful experience, but I just would NOT recommend buying this game if you are looking at this for the first time. I can see by the reviews that I'm in the minority, but I'm not gonna praise this game endlessly for being kind of what I always thought it was: not as fun as it wishes it was, and not as fun as it should be.