With your fingers stuffed with weapons and a warrant for the Devil’s arrest in your pocket, Shotgun Cop Man sends you on a nonstop blitz of latest concepts. This brief and candy action-platformer frequently reinvents itself throughout 10 intelligent worlds, leaving little room for a good suggestion to get stale. Once I mastered its distinct fashion of projectile-based motion, barrelling by way of the circles of hell become a pure energy fantasy. Even although it’s more durable than it must be to chase excessive scores and higher instances, I nonetheless had a blast gunning for a extra optimized run after the credit rolled.
Shotgun Cop Man’s goofy vibes, flashy acrobatics, and time assault setup transported me again to my center college days of bypassing the browser safety settings within the pc lab to sneak in runs of Flash video games like Fancy Pants Adventures or Electricman 2. Granted, this could blow lots of these research corridor time killers out of the water, however I may nonetheless simply see myself racing to the top of its first world with a pal whereas we’re presupposed to be engaged on a analysis paper or math homework. It shares the identical tight scope and paired again tone, however right here these masks a surprisingly deep platformer.
Shotgun Cop Man isn’t simply a normal run-n-gun shoot-em-up. Instead, the recoil out of your shotgun serves because the driving pressure behind a lot of the motion. Need to take out some demons to your proper? Well, you higher be sure that the coast is evident to your left once you pull the set off. This difficult, however finally rewarding, system of ballistic blowback fills in for genre-standards like leaping or dashing midair, whereas firing your sidearm — which ranges from a satisfyingly snappy however weak pistol to a robust gatling gun — means that you can hover midair or make extra exact hops.
You can’t simply spray and pray you wind up on the subsequent platform, although. Each weapon has restricted ammo, protecting Shotgun Cop Man comparatively grounded: the shotgun itself solely holds three shells at a time, so he wants to the touch terra firma to reload. That mentioned, sidearms are likely to have larger magazines, permitting for a dependable second choice to fall again on when it’s essential to get to the bottom and take one other shot at a troublesome bounce. This restrained method brings a levelheaded stability to Shotgun Cop Man that encourages mayhem and pace with out leaving precision and ability within the mud.
To make issues harder, Shotgun Cop Man additionally has to take care of the armies of Hell as he chases down their chief. Aside from a number of combat-focused ranges that mix every circle of Hell’s distinctive mechanics into an arena-style showdown, in addition to the requisite boss that reveals up on the finish of every 17-level world, Shotgun Cop Man is all about motion. Because of that, enemies play second fiddle right here, being handled as platforming obstacles masterfully woven into every degree. They act just like the bright-red explosive barrels of a 3D shooter, offering the satisfaction of popping them whereas providing path on the place and when to shoot. Shotgun Cop Man bets massive on its platforming acumen moderately than falling in-line with different motion platformer successes like Katana Zero, and it pays off in spades.
Still, this distinctive motion takes fairly a while to get used to, particularly when you’re taking part in with a controller: Pointing in two totally different instructions like a twin-stick shooter (left for strolling, proper for aiming) makes for an unnatural platformer management scheme. Wrapping my head round it felt like being requested to rub my stomach and pat my head on the similar time. Unfortunately, there’s actually no higher approach to make this particular kind of motion work on the sticks, although it’s way more comfy with a keyboard and mouse. Thankfully, Shotgun Cop Man’s accessibility options assist you to skip sure inputs, like making it so that you choose up new sidearms robotically, so you may tweak issues to be way more comfy.
I used to be midway by way of the roughly 5 hour marketing campaign by the point I felt like I’d totally climbed its comparatively steep studying curve, mastering this propulsion-based mix of fight and motion. Normally, this preliminary wrestle could be a knock towards it, however Shotgun Cop Man always introduces and innovates on new concepts whereas rewarding your rising mastery of them. It additionally units up methods that efficiently inspired me to obsessively replay ranges in an try and shave nanoseconds off my time. This potent mix dangles an appetizing carrot-on-a-stick to gnash at in bite-sized speedruns when you’ve discovered your footing.
When he inevitably takes a success, Shotgun Cop Man’s coronary heart comically pops out of his physique. Running into it is going to choose it up and restore well being, however he’ll die in a single hit with out it. When that occurs, the digital camera zooms in on his oddly detailed face as he says, “I die,” in a goofy, computerized voice. This minimal, self-aware humorousness units the tone total, as there’s in any other case not a lot of a premise to clarify right here (and developer Dead Toast Entertainment even pokes enjoyable at this within the credit by placing quotes across the phrase “Story”). You’re a cop with a shotgun making an attempt to arrest the Devil. Naturally, Old Scratch doesn’t play ball. Each time our hero catches as much as him, Satan tells the boy in blue to shove it, and also you proceed in your chase as soon as extra. It’s skinny, but it surely works, and is simply amusing sufficient to maintain issues shifting.
Unfortunately, that humorousness finally turns into Shotgun Cop Man’s Waterloo. Each time it zooms in on his face as he factors out the apparent, it takes far too lengthy to get again into the motion. It takes as many as three button presses to respawn, and even longer to restart a degree. I understand how foolish this sounds within the face of all the things Shotgun Cop Man will get proper, however in a sport the place you’ll be dying and making an attempt once more fairly a bit, these add as much as fully hamper any sense of momentum. That’s particularly obvious when each degree in Shotgun Cop Man grades your efficiency on whether or not or not you killed each enemy, beat the par time, took any injury, or did all three of these in the identical run. In what appears like a giant oversight, there’s no fast degree restart button once you die, so to chase that excellent run, it’s essential to resume the extent after that dying, pause, after which hit the retry choice from there. Because Shotgun Cop Man trades in seconds and milliseconds (most ranges took me lower than a minute to finish), this in any other case small bump within the street grew to become an outsized, pointless a part of mastering every degree.
That mentioned, for a sport that solely took me about 5 hours to see from finish to finish, Shotgun Cop Man crams in a staggeringly spectacular vary of improvements and spins on its seemingly easy run-and-shoot formulation. It ricochets from concept to concept, by no means permitting a mechanic to get outdated — in reality, there are fairly a number of I want received some extra time to shine, like reactive flooring, which alternate between protected and lethal every time they’re shot, or intelligent box-moving puzzles that put your understanding of every weapon’s energy to the check. Most mechanics get an opportunity to shine earlier than being woven into extra new mechanics afterward, however there’s additionally a powerful degree creator (unique to the PC model) that allows you to toy with a few of these concepts your self when you really feel like your favourite didn’t get its time within the solar.
I’m not a lot of a degree designer myself, however the creation suite supplies a strong toy chest for devoted designers to fiddle with. It doesn’t simply function instruments that allow you to recreate or broaden upon any intelligent concept discovered within the marketing campaign, it even contains wholly distinctive mechanics that aren’t discovered there, like further enemy and NPC sorts. I didn’t get to attempt any user-created ranges through the pre-release interval, however I’m actually excited to see what folks assume up as soon as Shotgun Cop Man is out within the wild.
