Thursday, May 14, 2015

SuperHotline Miami

SuperHotline Miami is an in browser fan created mash-up of Super Hot (play it here) and one of my favorites, Hotline Miami. Super Hot was an in browser first person shooter game released a few years ago. In Super Hot you made your way through stark white environments while engaging in firefights with red polygonal figures. But it has one major twist, time only moves when you do. This in turn creates a twitch trigger shooter that has you planning out your moves to choreograph the perfect play-through. If that sounds familiar it's because Hotline Miami runs on an extremely similar formula and a combination of the two makes for a really interesting and fun game.

SuperHotline combines Hotline Miami's top down viewpoint and gun-play with Super Hot's aesthetics and time stopping mechanics, the result is something special for sure. The game plays like Hotline Miami: wasd to move, left click to shoot, right click to pick guns up. And shares the objective of killing all enemies on screen to progress to the next level. Without the time stopping mechanic the game would be next to impossible to play because of its instadeath and dead accurate goons, but with it you can gracefully weave between the enemies bullets and have a moment to think on what your next few moves will be.

I would have thought that the mechanic wouldn't have worked as well as it did but I (to my pleasant surprise) found that time stop was very useful and not nearly as gimmicky as I perceived it to be. While SHM was a really fun game to play it was extremely short (each level only takes a few minutes on average to beat) but it's already had an update since its release so there is hope that more levels will be added later on.

Click here if you want to play the game, it should prove to be interesting even to those who don't play video games and since it's in browser practically any machine can run it