Bullet-time is cool, but arguably, it’s been overdone a little bit over the years. What was once a jaw-slackening special effect has devolved into slackening jaws for different reasons. For yawning. Because we’ve seen it all before.
Superhot – which is in fact stylised as SUPERHOT, but that’s frankly pissing me right off to type, so I shan’t do it again – promises to do something a little bit different with bullet-time, and do you know what? They might just have come up with the goods.
Superhot originally began life at a game jam, a caffeine and pizza-powered game development event, that challenges groups of like-minded folk to create games out of nothing under the power of their own collective inspiration. From there, it’s done the usual indie rounds of Kickstarter (earning $250K, that’s $150K over their target) and Steam Greenlight, which has allowed Superhot’s developer and publisher Superhot Team – not stylising it on your name either, sorry – to bring the game to PC this month.
In case you’ve missed the mini hype-bubble, Superhot is a combination of a first-person shooter and a turn-based strategy, forced through a funnel of time-wrangling mechanics to become a scintillating and intriguing gameplay experience, all wrapped up in a stylish white-and-red package.
Essentially, time only moves when you do, leading to the following properties:
- You get to combine John Woo-esque gunplay with the time control powers of Hiro Nakamura of brilliant-in-the-beginning TV series Heroes, into something approaching Neo from The Matrix (but without Carrie-Anne Moss in leather).
- You will most likely find yourself stuck in several checkmate scenarios, where you’re staring down at an incoming kill-shot and any move you make is already too late.
In both cases, our advice would be to embrace it, because it’s unique and quite special.
Superhot launches on February 25, 2016 and is available to pre-order now. It will be arriving on Xbox One later in the year.
