Shotgun Cop Man review

Shotgun Cop Man is a throwback to an earlier age of indie games, before the phrase roguelike deckbuilder had occurred to anyone, an age when 2D puzzle-platformers with a single mechanical hook were all the rage. "In this one you can reverse gravity." "In this one you can rewind time." Well, in Shotgun Cop Man you jump by shooting at Hell.

The plot is a wafer-thin excuse to fill levels with enemies and traps: You are a brick-shaped cop man who has descended into Hell to arrest Satan. Satan wears a string vest and has a bum-cleft chin, and each of the game's nine worlds begins with him giving you the finger and telling you to fuck off before buzzing demons lift him away. Do not go into Shotgun Cop Man expecting any more story than that.

DeadToast's previous game, My Friend Pedro, had an equally silly excuse plot—a talking banana told you to do murders—but explored it with surprising thoroughness. While I miss that level of commitment to nonsense, Satan's casual dismissals of your attempts to bring double-barreled due process to Hell are pretty funny.

It's a game about momentum. Shoot down with your shotgun and you get launched into the air, but shoot down with a pistol and you do a little hop that'll let you skip over a bullet without braining yourself on the spikes overhead. It's also about momentum because the levels are quick-fire bursts, full of diagonal slopes to slide down and gaps to launch yourself across in a propulsive race to the exit.

What you should expect is a taut action-platformer where you can grab a demon in midair then throw it at another demon to kill them both. (Something that's not tutorialized but doesn't need to be—an option to press the same key you use to pick up guns appears as you fly past a demon and it just makes sense.) Complications arrive in later levels like explosives, spinning lasers, and demons who are also wizards, as do more weapons to swap your pistol for, like the one that shoots in three directions at once.

Once pipes arrive the gun that ricochets becomes amazing, because if you shoot it down a curved pipe at the right angle you can pop a flying demon at the other end. This is the kind of joy you'll find in Shotgun Cop Man.

It nails the little details, like the way you stop falling briefly while shooting your pistol, letting you chain together a bunch of air-time kills as you plummet down a shaft full of demons, or the way the thumping music sounds tinny and distant when you've been hit and are frantically trying to grab the floating heart that stops you dying. Sound effects like the "foonk" you make when entering and exiting pipes and animations like the spinny one-hand reloads are all perfect too.

There's a level editor and achievements, and yet I can't see myself going back now I've defeated Satan. The moment I finished Shotgun Cop Man it left my head completely. Which is fine. For me, this is a one-and-done run, a single-serving treat I played for five hours and enjoyed and that's all it needs to be.