It’s a rail gun, essentially, allowing you to blast through multiple enemies at once. Throwing weapons have been expanded now, to the point where you can properly channel your inner Wick by killing people with a pencil, and a new gun is in the mix. Which admittedly is probably quite suspicious. MIND CONTROL DELETE works hard to expand the gameplay of the original which is why I opened with my excitement about knives. Landing your shots requires proper timing and precision, which is a lot to ask when three bullets are worming their way towards your cranium.
Either way, it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds. Time does move a little bit when you’re still, so you can’t dawdle for too long. The twist being that time only moves when you do, giving you ample time to squirm your way around all the enemy bullets before sending out a couple of your own.
You’re put into a level full of angry red men all trying to kill you and you have to kill ‘em right back. That, and the tendency to be a bit self-indulgent, means that the sequel doesn’t land quite as well as the original. The core gameplay is still as fun as ever - in fact more so - but it makes a few design choices that hold things back a bit. The third game in the SUPERHOT franchise - following SUPERHOT VR - is still a lot of fun, but it is beginning to show some signs of picking up baggage along the way. A proper session of SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE feels like you’re watching John Wick with someone who can’t keep their hands off the remote.
It proves that the SUPERHOT team knows their formula works and they know how to execute it.
Throwing a knife into a man’s face then running towards him, dodging a hail of bullets, before yanking it out and throwing it into his colleague? Pure poetry. You can throw knives now! I know that’s a strange way to open up a review but it’s very exciting. It feels balletic, John Woo-style, to toss a gun in someone’s face to send them reeling so you can steal their dropped baseball bat and smash them into pieces.SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE Review (2020) It feels cool not to look at that hit, relying instead on the full-screen number momentarily flashing up your kill count: “16”. It feels skillful to launch a sword through the air at where you think an enemy is about to appear and to hit. It feels slick to grab a gun out of mid-air, even when there’s no skill involved in doing so. They aren't the only ones who'd tell you to play Superhot - here, let Graham tell you about how the first game makes you feel awesome: They also advise people to play the original game before the pick up this version. "We’re still a good 9-12 months away from a full release," they say, "so please don’t forget that this is nowhere close to a complete, satisfying experience just yet." While the game is out on early access tomorrow, the devs warn that it's a long way from finished.
If Mind Control Delete successfully "distills and expands on the same intoxicating rhythm of slow motion combat", as it claims to, then hopefully I can get more out of it than the 4 hours I spent in Superhot's campaign. There were only a few weapon types, and the only real variation came from level design. The first game gives you the power to swap bodies with your opponents, and the VR version throws in a fairly boring charged zap attack, but other than that every level plays out in basically the same way. I'm intrigued as to what those abilities could be. As you unlock powerful abilities and gain access to new playable characters, so will your enemies grow stronger, smarter and more desperate to stop you.
Each challenge will make you more powerful and bring you closer to deciphering the secrets hidden from you by the system. The game will force you through dozens of increasingly difficult time-moves-only-when-you-move gameplay challenges. The biggest difference from traditional Superhot sounds like the way you grow in power over the course of the game. There's a reveal trailer below, which I'm going to cleverly describe as a supercut even if that's not technically accurate.
Superhot: Mind Control Delete will free if you already own the original, though it costs money during early access, and introduces a roguelike twist to the time-bending FPS. Super-whot?!! A standalone expansion for ace 'time moves when you do' shooter, Superhot, is releasing on Steam early access tomorrow.