We have been following SUPERHOT for quite awhile now. From its humble beginnings in the 7DFPS Game Jam, to its wildly successful Kickstarter, and even a full fledged interview with the team’s former community manager Luke Spierewka, the game is definitely no stranger to our front page. I’ve been a big fan of SUPERHOT’s concept and gameplay ever since its earliest builds, and so it’s no surprise that the game has only gotten better in time for its full release on Steam today.
At its core SUPERHOT functions very much like a traditional first person shooter. The spin here is that time is dramatically slowed down so long as your character remains stationary. This allows the game to throw you into situations that would be almost impossible in a traditional first person shooter and more importantly, it allows you to look and feel like a fucking badass.
There is no reload button in this game. Guns have a finite number of shots before you’ll have to discard them and search out some other death-dealing tool. Sometimes these items will come from the environment, but a greater majority of your armory will likely be pilfered from the very hands of your enemies. It’s not uncommon to approach someone while you’re unarmed, dodge all of their attempts to fire upon you, disarm them with a quick slap to the face and then blow them away with their own gun you caught in mid air.
There’s not much to be found by way of upgrades or abilities. You’ll have used all the guns and weapons by the halfway point of the game, and aside from a few major setpieces you’re not likely to be surprised by any new locations or architecture. In fact everything from the maps to the monochrome enemies make SUPERHOT feel relatively minimal when it comes to visuals. Every level is basically you fighting the same guys over and over again different loadouts, and yet somehow it never really seems to get old. I was having just as much fun playing SUPERHOT hours in as I was right from the start.
After clearing each stage or challenge the game will replay your run at full speed and show you how damn cool you looked. If you have a particularly glorious run you can upload the replay to killstagram.com with a quick click of a button. While the replays are a nice feature, Killstagram wasn’t working during my review playthrough, and it would have been nice to have an option to just grab a quick video file or to at least be able to disable the UI during replays so that I could use my own capture method to grab the gameplay video. It looks like since writing this killstagram.com is up and fully functional, so hopefully players won’t encounter any trouble holding onto their best moments from the game.
Here I can be seen cleaving a bullet in half with my katana.
Because of the game’s reductionist aesthetic I was rather surprised to find that it shipped with a story mode. This mode only clocks in at about two hours and will take you through a good portion of levels to get you familiar with the game. To be clear, I find SUPERHOT engaging enough that I would suggest it didn’t need any type of story mode. The fact that there’s even a somewhat interesting narrative (that I won’t even begin to spoil here) is just the cherry on top of a surprisingly robust package. I remember getting lost in the core game at E3 last year before being politely ushered along by the developer so others could play. It’s an easy game to fall into even when you’re just restarting missions over and over again, and that’s to say nothing about exploring all the other goodies and secrets the game’s menus are hiding.
Upon completing story mode though you’ll unlock a huge chunk of content including the self descriptive “endless mode” as well as a challenge mode that will take you through the game’s main levels with different twists. Endless mode offers more than enough difficulty and variety to keep players busy, but challenge mode takes things even further with some really cool alternative methods for playing the game, these include things like “Full Stop” which grinds the game to a dead halt whenever you hold still with the added effect that enemy bullets move significantly faster when the action starts. On the other end of the spectrum we have things like “Hard Mode” which will greatly reduce the slow motion effects and stop enemies from being stunned for quite so long in combat.
SUPERHOT is easily my favorite game that I’ve played so far this year. Some might see the price point as a shade too high but I think it’s more than fair for the amount of content you get. Is the game’s schtick going to completely change the FPS industry? No absolutely not, but oh my god is it a blast to play.
EDIT: In our originally published review we listed the game’s price at fourteen dollars. This seems to be a price that numerous websites reported in early February with release date and pre-order details. It seems the actual retail of the price is $24.99.
