SHOOTOUT INC. Demo

Every once in a while someone turns the video games industry upside down with a simple, yet incredibly engaging gameplay idea. It happened a few years ago with Hotline Miami, and it’s about to happen again with SUPERHOT. Naturally, the ideas these games put into motion can be reused and even improved, but they rarely get as much recognition as the originals.

SHOOTOUT INC. is a top-down shooter that looks and feels like Hotline Miami when you first start playing, but you’ll soon realize that things are quite different. As such, the main gameplay gimmick is that time only moves when you do, or at least it speeds up to normal. Hence, you can use the extra thinking time to avoid bullets and do some damage.

There’s even a story to explain how you are able to do this, in case anyone needed one. Thus, you are a robot named QA-Bot1986, and someone made a mistake when they manufactured you. Because of this, your processing unit can handle data much faster than every other bot, which allows you to anticipate their moves and basically slow down time, at least as a figure of speech.

Each level has a unique layout, and there are many enemies waiting to have a shot at you the second you move. In fact, it may take you a while to understand how to dodge their bullets, because even when everything moves incredibly slowly, you still need a great sense of intuition. On top of it all, you have to remember that everything speeds up once you move to dodge the bullets, so you need to stop immediately and reassess the situation.

You also have to shoot back in the meantime, using one of the guns picked up from a knocked out enemy. Speaking of which, you can also kick and punch, although it’s pretty much impossible to do anything when three or more enemies are shooting you at once. Some weapons can fire quicker, while shotguns send out a lot of smaller pellets at once, which means that each situation is different and it requires a new approach.

All things considered, SHOOTOUT INC. should do quite well for itself if everything stays the same by the time the full version is released. However, it needs more original elements to gain any real popularity, because it’s difficult to praise a clone.