The story of SUPERHOT began in 2013 with 7DFPS, a game jam. The team launched a website with a playable prototype and it became popular very quickly. After this first success the Polish developers decided to create a Kickstarter and fortunately they reached their goal. A few days ago they finally published their game on Steam.

So what is SUPERHOT about?  TIME. Time only moves when you move, which isn´t entirely correct (it moves veeeery slowly). At it´s core it is a very simple first person shooter with melee combat and a small range of weapons (SMG, shotgun, pistols). What makes it really special is it´s use of the aforementioned time mechanic. As long as you don´t move your enemies stand almost still. You can watch the bullets fly around slowly like in Matrix (even more slower). This makes the combat a lot more tactical. You need to watch in which direction the bullets will go and also if you are surrounded by enemies.

The coolest weapon in the game is certainly the katana. It let´s you slice your enemies in half with a very statisfing “slash” sound. This gives the katana-moments a very appealing “Kill Bill”-vibe.

The most problematic weapon by far is the SMG. While it is very powerful, it makes you an easy target because each time you shoot a bullet, time progresses and the SMG quickly fires 3 bullets, making the tactical approach a lot harder.

Later in the game you get the ability to switch your body with your enemies, thus you are able to escape almost impossible situations.

Nevertheless this game is a lot more frustrating than I anticipated. You can´t really meausure how large your character is, so it might happen that you get hit by a bullet thinking that you should have evaded it easily. Furthermore you have to be completely aware of your surroundings because new enemies can spawn everywhere, only indicated by a glowing red light. So if you focus too much on the battle in front of you, you gonna die quickly. I also experienced some heavy lagging with the game and I´m not really sure why (my rig runs most games on Very High).

The artstyle is very fancy: the environment is painted in white and your enemies are made of shiny red crystals. Only throwable objects or weapons appear in black.

In summary SUPERHOT is a really cool game. You can feel like Neo, dodging bullets. It is really fun to mess with the time mechanic. It just so happend that I killed a guy, then got hungry, made me something to eat and then came back took his gun and shot his friend. Awesome! Just be aware that you have to pay a pretty high price for the game right now. It is 20€ on Steam and the storymode alone shouldn´t take you more than 2 hours (the story itself isn´t really worth mentioning).