Demo Time: SUPERHOT VR Demo (OQ2)

SUPERHOT VR Demo

Systems: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest

Release Date: December 5, 2016

Publisher: Superhot Team

Developer: Superhot Team

SUPERHOT, the original standalone game has always interested me, even before it was ported over to all the VR headsets.  I like the idea of playing an action game that doesn't move as quickly as you would expect it to.  To have the enemies only move you you move, along with any projectiles and bullets feels pretty ingenious.  I also loved the stripped-down aesthetic, that all of the background and detail to everything on-screen was not the focus of the game, but instead was to make the player feel like a complete bad-ass.  Essentially John Wick.  And once I downloaded the demo on the Oculus Quest 2 and played through it, I realized that it was more than just a first-person action game, but really a first-person puzzle game with guns.  And wine bottles.  And ashtrays.  And throwing stars.  And calculators.

The demo for SUPERHOT VR consists of 10 stages that function as a tutorial to the game's mechanics.  All enemies appear as a reddish-orange human who shatters upon being hit by an object or your fist, and you have to "clench your fist" as I have tried slapping them open-palmed to no effect.  The demo starts off by giving you a gun to shoot a stationary enemy, giving you a taste of the shattering body and level transition, followed by a similar stage, but here you have to punch your two enemies.  The demo then introduces the concept of dodging incoming bullets Neo-style and then disarming an enemy by punching them, knocking the gun out of their hand, then grabbing the gun in midair, then shooting the enemy. This was when I knew that I was having a great time because how friggin cool is that!?  The next group of stages has you dodging enemy punches, then introduces throwing stars while three enemies run at you from varying distances.  It is here that the demo introduces you to the mechanic that any object that is dark-colored can be used as a weapon.

The next series of stages are kind of like a checkpoint since if you die in any of the following stages, you respawn here, with a gun in front of you and once you grab said gun, three enemies appear, one in front of you with a gun pointed at you.  This is where you find out that if you shoot an enemy who is holding a gun, 99.47% of the time that gun will fly in your direction with the purpose of catching it, then dispatching the other two enemies running at you.  The remaining four levels are essentially this, taking out three enemies with either your fists or other objects in the environment while not getting killed yourself.  And that is where the puzzle aspect really comes in.

In the demo, all of the enemies start in the exact same location and all of the same items respawn in the same place so there is no randomization.  You can decide not to move your hands while analyzing where each enemy is and slowly moving your hands to get an idea of what they are planning, but it is not always easy to keep your eye on an enemy who is approaching your from one side while also keeping an eye on the enemy who is shooting you from across the room while poking your head out from behind a computer console to throw an ashtray and the shooter.  Thankfully, when you die, then the game does a quick job of respawning you at the checkpoint so there is very little time lost having to click a button to restart, then clicking a "yes" button confirming you want to restart followed by a loading screen reminding you that you should duck out of the way when enemies are shooting at you.

To date, I think I have played the demo maybe 10+ times?  It is a short demo once you figure out how to move in each stage and how best to use the weapons and objects, spending maybe two-and-a-half minutes* from start to finish, longer though if you get tagged in one of the last two stages.  It works well as a stress reliever because one-shotting brittle glass-like enemies with a punch to the face or a wine bottle to the groin can be pretty cathartic.  And feeling like an action movie bad-ass is really what this game is primarily about.  So I will definitely be picking up the main game, but I have a couple of other games that I am working through right now so I'm not hard up to pay full price ($24.99) and will likely wait for a sale.

I have read some comments specifically about the VR port of the game removing one or two story-points that have the player either shoot themselves or throw themselves off of the roof of a building as being censored content.  I was initially perturbed about the content being removed from the main game, but then I read a comment from the developers explaining their decision and I appreciate their stance.  I do not mind the devs saying, "You know what, this thing we put in our game we kind of regret and is not really what we want included, so we decided to remove it" and would obviously take this type of edit on a case-by-case basis and in this particular case, it does not bother me.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Now I've Caught Your Attention

*P.S.  I've included an entire run of the demo below if you want to see me have horrible aim with throwing stars, but to also show how smooth the game plays in VR with having use of both of your hands, and because of this I do not know if I could play it on PC with keyboard/mouse controls now.