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If you didn’t play My Friend Pedro, you missed out. Specifically, you missed out on clearing a room full of Real Bad Dudes by ricocheting bullets off a casually thrown frying pan while leaping from a skateboard in midair slow-motion.
DeadToast Entertainment, the developer of My Friend Pedro, is back with another slow-mo gunfest called Shotgun Cop Man. It’s an even more lo-fi affair, which adds to its clarity. It reminds me of VVVVVV in its 2D simplicity. Stick-figure demons with guns wait beside pits of diagonal-line spikes to blast and be blasted as you, a man with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol or sometimes Uzi in the other, leap overhead.
You do not leap by pressing the jump button, because that would be boring. “Jump button,” give me a break. That sounds like baby shit for babies and you can get it out of here. No, in Shotgun Cop Man you do not jump by jumping. You shoot the ground with your shotgun. Then you shoot demons with your handgun, which suspends you in midair for some reason.
Every level of Shotgun Cop Man is a mix of sliding down diagonal slopes and bouncing up between ledges, either blasting away at Hell itself to propel yourself further, or at demons because they’re there and shooting back. Aiming in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in demands rewiring some fundamental part of your brain, and I did find myself occasionally hurling myself directly at a spinning sawblade trap or down a hole I just climbed out of thanks to a temporary brainfart.
I didn’t stop having fun, though. Shotgun Cop Man is one of those pure videogamey videogames, with little in the way of story to slow you down. “Freeze, Satan!” announces Shotgun Cop Man without irony. “You’re under arrest!” Then Satan, who is wearing a nipply goth string vest, replies by giving the finger and shouting, “Fuck you, Shotgun Cop Man!” That is what passes for the plot in Shotgun Cop Man, and it’s more than enough.
The Shotgun Cop Man demo is 17 levels long and you can play it as part of Steam Next Fest. The full game is due later this year and will cost you $US10.
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Kurt Indovina
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