Sometimes a video game is an epic. It’s daunting, and it’s forever, and it’s a slate of marble you slowly chip away at for weeks and months and an entire year. Other times, a video game is lightning and fireworks. It’s an instant flash, and immediate dopamine, and a bag of chips that’s empty before you know it but also maybe empty before you have too much of it. It’s Shotgun Cop Man.
Shotgun Cop Man puts arcade action and mechanical perfection above all else. As the follow-up to indie sleeper hit My Friend Pedro, it’s stripped down and simplified in a lot of ways to achieve that. There’s a story here in the loosest and most barely defined sense of the word: you are shotgun cop man, and you need to go to hell to arrest Satan. It’s and instant, charmingly stupid setup to get you straight to the business in a way that’s reminiscent of the most experimental Adult Swim cartoons. Don’t worry about why you’re here, just accept that you are here and have fun.
Your journey through Hell takes the form of a sidescrolling twitch-precision platformer, but you don’t have a jump button. Instead you have a pistol in one hand and a shotgun in the other. The kick of the shotgun gives a rocket-jump level of bounce when fired, and the pistol keeps you afloat and just barely manoeuvrable while in mid-air. Both weapons have limited clip sizes, but they reload the instant you touch the ground. Every level has an exit and a slew of demons, traps, and platforms in the way of it, tasking you with learning the ropes of your momentum-based toolkit to safely navigate there.
Shotgun Cop Man does a great job of consistently dishing out new elements through each level and chapter of the campaign to keep the challenge fresh and justify the 100+ levels you’ll be shotgun-hopping through. New weapons give you alternative ways to dispose of enemies and unique momentum-modifiers, while the increasing array of traps and obstacles keep you guessing. I love that the game is incredibly challenging, but also refreshingly forgiving in how it lets you tackle those challenges – upon death, you can instantly load back into a checkpoint in the middle of the level, and the game is incredibly generous with the placement of these checkpoints, often dumping you right back where you died each time.
You can die and hop back in as many times as you need to in order to finish a level, but each level comes with a trio of completion challenges tasking you with defeating every enemy, beating it without dying, and beating it in a certain time limit. You don’t have to complete all of these challenges for each stage, but they offer a nice incentive to slowly wean yourself off the checkpoint system as you become more confident in your shotgun-copping skills.
That variety in level design and mechanics I mentioned earlier, sadly, isn’t reflected nearly as well in the other areas of the game. Every level of Shotgun Cop Man looks practically identical to the last, sporting black level geometry on a gloomy darkened background that means they all blend together. The lack of environmental variety, or even some basic colour palette swaps makes every chapter blend together. Even in the game’s custom campaign editor, which lets you freely draw out and share your own custom levels or chapters online, you have no options for visual customisation or even song selection. I love a game with Workshop mod support and custom content options, but when these options only provide mechanical alterations and no aesthetic or visual ones, I can’t imagine there being much room for creativity in the kind of custom campaigns we’ll see from this game.
It’s still an absolute treat to blast through hundreds of demons in Shotgun Cop Man and master the finicky art of shotgun-jumping, I just wish there was a bit more care put into offering some visual and auditory variety to make each moment of the game stand out a bit more from the last. It’s an impressive and incredibly addictive experience nonetheless, but ends up being a blast of fireworks that’s over just a bit sooner than you were hoping for.