The envelope is far less attractive, and the restriction to not use firearms but only punches and thrown items ends up becoming more repetitive in the long run. Shifty suffers from the comparison to Hotline Miami. It happened rarely enough not to be an issue, but the game does not succeed to maintain a high framerate all throughout its length. The clean style of the graphics easily conveys all the necessary information (and destructible walls and items gives a lot more punch to the punches!), however the framerate can sometimes tank really hard when a lot of explosion are taking place with many enemies on screen as well. Moving on to the technical aspect, the controls can be rebound and work perfectly fine both with controllers and keyboard & mouse. A more memorable music with a strong identity would have also helped set the levels apart. Shifty does not deliver on both accounts. Only the last level managed to excite me again with its chaotic redesign of the levels.įinally, while Hotline Miami had a well-paced mysterious and hypnotizing story enhanced with ground-breaking music, Mr. The same criticism can be aimed at both games, seeing the same thing over and over becomes dull despite the amazing core gameplay. While I mentioned the slow-motion, I will add that semi-destructible environments (cool physics overall) and a big sequence of levels taking place in a single building reminded me of another game: F.E.A.R. There are about 15 levels, and the game can be finished in 5-7h with no incentive to come back. Sadly, even though the levels can be quite long, quitting the game and coming back brings back to the latest elevator rather than door. Each green door loading a new area is a checkpoint, and each elevator is the beginning of the levels. Repeating fights can become tiresome, since you mostly have the same approach each time. The save system is fair, but sometimes stretches the number of fights to survive before the next checkpoint. A bullet close to the protagonist will active the slow-mo, and while this can sometimes allow for a last-second save, it can often be triggered by a grazing bullet that would have never have hit the player, and thus waste the precious ability that would have seen a better use in the next difficult room. Hitting many enemies in a short span of time will fill up a slow-motion bar, however it is sadly not delivered to the control of the player. There are dozens of goons to fight, and yet Mr. And talking about challenge, while the beginning of the game is fairly easy, it gradually ramps up and the latter levels will require quick thinking and quick reflexes to surmount the odds. Lasers and homing rockets will offer different sort of challenges. Shifty makes us of its protagonist’s ability to manoeuver at high speed by throwing tons of traps at the player. Furthermore, while Hotline Miami was focused on the combat, Mr. Variety comes from the enemies and their little quirks: some can dash, some will blow up after dying, some have spread weapons, some can throw explosive, and so on. Shifty’s formula of move-punch-move-punch eventually becomes repetitive. Shifty starts to break down a little bit: while Hotline Miami offered a variety of weapons that changed the approach to the game, Mr. So while Hotline Miami was an obvious comparison as it is a leviathan of the genre, both games play extremely different. Without any item, the punches are powerful and give an excellent feedback to the player. The genre might thus drift closer to a Beat ‘em up, except that enemies thankfully die quickly. It is possible to throw some (lethal) items, however our protagonist only resorts to melee items (broom, staff, keyboards) and never picks up a firearm. Unlike all the other Top-Down Shooters, Mr. The enemies react very quickly, but teleporting confuses them just long enough to get behind them. The necessity to abide to a rhythm pushes to enter the game’s flow, while leaving some room for extra quick manoeuvers. There is a teleportation bar that empties upon each blink to prevent player from abusing it, but it recharges quickly enough to get in a quick rhythm without needing to ever stop. Shifty is completely acing it in the gameplay department. Empowering and beautiful blinking from one bad guy to the other and punching them to death is exhilarating, thus Mr.
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