With a warrant for the devil’s arrest in a gun-filled hand and pocket, the shotgun police send you with a non-stop electric shock of new ideas. This short, sweet action platformer is constantly reinvented in ten clever worlds, with little room for good ideas to make it old. As I mastered that distinctive style of projectile-based movement, the barrels passing through the hellish circles turned into pure power fantasy. It’s hard to chase high scores and better times, but after the credits were rolled, there was an explosive fire for a more optimized run.
Shotgun Cop Man’s goofy vibe, flashy acrobatics and time attack setups go back to middle school days when bypassing the browser security settings in computer labs, sneaking out with flash games run like Fancy Pants Adventure and Electric Man 2. Paper or mathematics homework. It shares the same tight scope and paired backtone, but here we mask the surprisingly deep platformer.
Shotgun Cop Man is not just a standard Run-n-Gun Shoot M-Up. Instead, the recoil from the shotgun serves as the driving force behind most movements. Do you need to take out some demons to your right? Now, when you pull the trigger, it’s better to make sure the coast is clear to the left. This rewarding, yet ultimately rewarding ballistic blowback system fills genre standards such as jumps and dashing airars, and fires sidearms.
However, it cannot be sprayed and made available to appear on the next platform. Each weapon has a limited ammunition, and relatively grounds the shotgun policeman. The shotgun itself only holds three shells at a time, so you will need to touch and reload the Terra Pharma. That said, side arms tend to have bigger magazines, allowing you to retreat a reliable second option when you reach the ground and need to take another shot in a tough jump. This suppressed approach brings level head balance to male shotgun police officers who promote mayhem and speed without leaving behind accuracy and skill in the dust.
To make the matter more difficult, the shotgun policeman must fight the army of hell as he chases after their leader. A few battle-centric levels that blend each circle of hell’s unique mechanics into arena-style showdowns, and the bosses that need to appear at the end of each 17 levels of the world, Shotgun Cop, are all about movements. So the enemy plays a second fiddle here, treating it as a platform obstacle, and is woven beautifully into each level. They behave like bright red explosive barrels of 3D shooters, offering the satisfaction of popping them while providing direction as to where and when to shoot. Shotgun Cop Man takes a big bet on the platform’s insights rather than on par with the success of other action platformers Katana Zeroit pays off with spades.
Still, this unique movement takes quite a while to get used to it, especially if you’re playing with a controller. Two different directions (left for walking and aimed) like twin stick shooters make for an unnatural platformer control scheme. I wrapped my head around and felt like I had been asked to rub my belly and tap my head at the same time. Unfortunately, it’s much more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, but there’s really no better way to make this particular type of movement work with a stick. Thankfully, Shotgun Cop Man’s accessibility feature allows you to skip certain inputs.
I was in the middle of a roughly five-hour campaign before I fully climbed the relatively steep learning curve and mastered this propulsion-based fusion of combat and movement. Normally this initial struggle is a knock on it, but the shotgun cop guy constantly introduces and innovates new ideas, rewarding your growing proficiency. It also sets up a system that encourages obsessive replay of levels to shave nanoseconds from time. This powerful blend will hang appetizing carrot sticks with bite-sized speed run once you find your footing.
When he inevitably hits, the mind of the shotgun cop comically leaps out of his body. If he hits it he picks it up and restores health, but he will die in one hit without it. When that happens, the camera zooms in on his strangely detailed face, as he says, “I’m going to die,” in a goofy, computerized voice. This minimalistic sense of humor for self-awareness sets the tone overall, as there is not much assumption to describe here (and the developer’s dead toast entertainment enjoys this in the credits by placing quotes around the word “story”). You are a policeman with a shotgun trying to arrest the devil. Naturally, old scratchers don’t play the ball. Every time our hero catches up to him, Satan tells the young boy to stab it and you continue your pursuit once more. It’s thin, but it’s just funny enough to work and keep things moving.
Unfortunately, that sense of humor eventually becomes Shotgun Cop Waterloo. Every time he zooms in on his face, it takes too long to get back to the action, as he points out what is obvious. Respawn will take more time to press three buttons and restart the level. I know how stupid this sounds in the face of all of Shotgun Cops, but in a game where you’re dying and trying to redo, these will completely hinder your sense of momentum. It’s especially noticeable when every level in Shotgun Cop Man evaluates performance on whether they killed all enemies, broke par time, deal damage, or did all three on the same run. What feels like a big surveillance is not a quick-level restart button when you die. So, to chase that full run, after its death, you need to pause and resume the level, then press the Retry option from there. Shotgun Cop Man trades in seconds and milliseconds (most levels took less than a minute to complete), so otherwise small bumps on the road became an oversized and unnecessary part of learning each level.
That being said, for a game that only took me around five hours to see from end to end, the shotgun cop spins a surprisingly impressive innovation and its seemingly simple run-and-shoot formula. It never allows mechanics to get older, from ideas to ideas. In fact, you want to shine a time that alternates between the safety and the deadly thing every time they are filmed, or you want to alternate between clever box moving puzzles that understand the power of each weapon in a test. Most mechanics get the chance to shine before they are later woven into newer mechanics, but there are also impressive level creators (only for PC versions) who can toy some of these ideas yourself if you think your favorites aren’t spending time in the sun.
I’m not a designer on my own level, but Creation Suite offers a robust toy breast for dedicated designers to get confused. Not only does it contain tools that allow you to replicate or extend the clever ideas found in the campaign, but it also includes completely unique mechanics that you won’t find there, such as extra enemies and NPC types. Although we weren’t able to try user-created levels during the pre-release period, we’re really excited to see what people think after Shotgun Cop Man comes out on Wild.
