SUPERHOT is a first person shooter in which time only moves when you do. When I first heard of it I thought it was a fun gimmick and not much more, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Every aspect of SUPERHOT is meticulously crafted towards it’s goal of making you feel awesome, and I’m gonna talk about that, because I’m in love with this game.

SUPERHOT isn’t just not hurt by it’s simple colour scheme of Red/White/Grey, I think it would be a worse game if it’s visuals were any more complex. Enemies are red, weapons are grey, everything else is white. This means you are never confused about what is happening. You never feel cheated by trying to pick up something that isn’t a weapon, or an enemy blending into the environment. It also just looks beautiful, in it’s own incredibly simplistic way, I find myself mashing the screenshot button constantly because of organic moments just looking incredibly cool.

Everything just feels right in SUPERHOT, enemies die in exactly the way you would expect them to, you watch a bullet make contact with them, they then ragdoll very realistically from that exact point. Many games have ridiculous death animations to make things look more exciting, SUPERHOT doesn’t need this, the deaths are incredibly fast, a guy gets shot in the face and immediately drops to the ground like a rock, but this looks incredible because you see it happen slowly.

The game has, unless I missed something, 5 weapons: A Pistol, an Assault Rifle, a Shotgun, Baseball bat, and my personal favourite, the Katana. All 5 of these weapons feel unique, they all play differently, and they all look very different. This is important as once again, you have perfect information, you never feel cheated by an enemy having a weapon you didn’t understand. If something is grey it’s a weapon, if it isn’t one of those 5 things, it’s just something you can throw at an enemy to stagger them.

The gameplay loop is essentially just killing red dudes, you can stagger them by punching them in the face (or anywhere else, but come on, punch the face) or toss an object at them, and then grab their weapon out of the air, and proceed to destroy them with it, use that weapon for a while, then grab another one and so on. So far so boring, right?

What makes SUPERHOT so wonderful, is that you are performing that gaming loop, while being shot at by 2 or 3 other guys, or when you get good at the endless mode which in my opinion is the real meat of the game, 7 or 8 guys. It makes you feel like Neo, as you survive being shot by 8 guns, not through luck, but by skill, switching guns every few seconds to deal with never-ending threats at lightning speed, but you see this in slow motion, meticulously planning your attack in moment-to-moment action more hectic than anything I have ever played. You are encouraged to keep moving because if you don’t, nothing really happens, and even when you are jumping about the place, you can take all the time you need to plan every single move you make, it’s more of a puzzle than a shooter.

You know those moments in movies where Joe Protagonist jumps into a room and kills 8 dudes while rolling over a table using 5 different guns with a level of expertise no human could ever hope to attain? No game I have ever played makes you feel like that, and SUPERHOT does so incredibly well, It’s fucking amazing. Go play it.