SUPERHOT is a new kind of a first-person shooter, where the time when you are not moving, and start moving when you do. ;The games started its way in a KickStarter campaign and was able to successfully pledged $250K to fund the project.
Superhot was first developed as a non-VR game for PC, Mac, and Linux. On Jun 10, 2014, At E3, SUPERHOT Team, its developer, announced an Oculus support and people could play the latest build with Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2. SUPERHOT was just meant to be played in VR and many of the people who backed the project asked for VR support. ;
The game isn't your conventional first-person shooter game, and that's where its beauty lies. ;As written in the release date trailer: "..an FPS game where time moves only when you move.". If you think about the movie Matrix and the slow-mo bullet-time scene, you probably already know how the gameplay looks like. Indeed, it certainly seems that the game was inspired by that popular scene, and Superhot Team did an amazing job to translate that movement-style into a phenomenal gameplay mechanics like no other. ;
The game is described in many places as FPS shooter, but you can also pick up and throw objects and use your fists to punch enemies. When you stop moving, everything around you stops moving as well. This helps you to carefully plan strategic moves before moving and taking an action. You can see where useful objects are placed, where the enemies are and build your movement based on that. ;
Sometimes the enemies will attack you from different directions, and you need to make a quick turn to observe their location, dodge incoming bullets and plan which one to kill first. You can throw a battle on one guy to distract him while you quickly turn around, evade incoming projectiles and, shoot that guy down, and turn back to finish out the first guy. ;You can even still a gun or rifle from an enemy that tries to attack you by distracting him and run close to him to grab his weapon.
The game takes place both indoors and outdoors and each place has many obstacles and unique objects superbly compliment the gameplay mechanics. ;
Superhot feature geometric shape visuals, and not just that it doesn't take something out from the experience, instead it actually really compliment it very nicely. The surrounding space is colored in white while weapons and your fist are black, and enemies are colored in red. This helps you to quickly identify who is who and what is what, so you can focus on a strategic gameplay, rather than spend time on analyzing the scene from all its unrelated and distracting objects.
You have both melee attacks and weapons and firearms which you can use to take down your enemies. You can steal weapons from your opponents as well. So for example, if you see an enemy NPC coming at you with a rifle, you can throw your pistol at him, and once he gets hit and release its weapon, you can grab it and use it instantly.
The developer has released a prototype of the game which can be played on Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera browsers using the Unity player plugin.
All in all, the game brings fresh new mechanics and bold new style to the FPS arena. We all need innovation in many fields to keep things fresh and interesting, and the gaming industry isn't any different. ;In my opinion, Superhot team has managed to do what much bigger companies failed, and it's to innovate and bring something new to the table. Yes, it's easier for small developer companies to come up with new ideas and make those ideas a reality, but I've been playing FPS games for years and was starving for a new type of FPS shooter. So I can only praise Superhero team for delivering us such an enjoyable shooter. It's going to be even more amazing in VR and hopefully, we would see more cool games from this company in the future.