Let’s boot up superhot.exe and start a John Wick style skirmish of incredible feats, while I sit back on the couch in my doughy body planning it all out in this innovative first-person shooter. This game borrows several elements from Keanu Reeves most notable characters to string together a meta-episodic story line that invokes Matrix hacking, wake up Neo boy it’s time to discuss our relation to the system.
The core concept of the game is that time only moves when you do. In those brief respites, you can shoot a gun, throw it at a bad red guy, disarm another enemy, grab his gun, and blast him in the face before jumping into the body of another guy to gain a tactical advantage. Your savage rampage across polygonal people, as they shatter into a million tiny pieces, is a calculated puzzle of quick time events instead of an endless onslaught of enemies you mow down to satiate the generic leads unquenchable thirst for blood.
Every split-second decision asks the player to slow down, consider all the options available, and then proceed with the action. Just like watching an action movie sequence of our hero’s wits being pushed to the limits as he comes up with new and inventive ways to murder henchmen, the player’s elongated adrenaline boost is not reduced to decimating one enemy into the ground and then turning around as another waits for his chance at daddy’s spankings. Focus too much on a single kill and the enemy you forgot was sneaking behind a corner will return your glass-like polygonal head back into sand.
Playing this game on the switch you’ll be using the gyroscope to contort your wrists in Cirque du Soleil fashion, which makes aiming more natural on the system, and brings to mind what the Wii wanted to be back in the day with games like Red Steel. My only real issue is how short some of these levels tended to be, especially considering the endless swarm mode unlocked after the story. The campaign lasts around three hours, and while some levels feel more engaging, others are over before they’ve even begun. Following the completion of a level, it plays out in real time as you watch the last several minutes be condensed into a few seconds of artful rampage. But, while cool watching an appropriate slew of high-octane acrobatic marvels, if even in slowed-down time the level length is just barely longer than the ten second replay it undermines the full potential of the mechanic.
It’s a fun, entertaining game that tries to make a modern shooter more than inching forward to the next bit of cover while picking specks off in the distance, akin to Doom (2016) rather than Call of Duty. Thankfully, Superhot draws from the high-points of Keanu Reeves action career instead of taking inspiration from Johnny Mnemonic.