Superhot Review

So, tell me about this attacker.Superhot Head

Well, we were just relaxing you know. Then out of nowhere this guy comes running in and just starts attacking us. He punched Jim so hard he exploded into a thousand pieces! Poor Jim. He was due to get married soon.

His punch did that!?Superhot Head

Yeah. We tried to fight back but it’s like he could see everything we were going to do, he was dodging bullets! I only survived because he ignored me…

We’re going to sit you down with a sketch artist and then we’re going to get this guy ok?

Ok…

MeWanted

Superhot

Players: 1-3
Time: 20-40 min
Ages: 12+
Designer: Manuel Correia
Artist: Paweł Niziołek
Publisher: Board&Dice


First Person Shooters don’t appear much in tabletop games. Like trying to sculpt the warped projections of Esher, there is some property of the original’s medium that simply cannot be replicated in the other. An FPS is about action, about twitch responses, something that just doesn’t translate to the physical world where players need to control and track all elements themselves. Let alone the whole “first person” part of the experience.

Other games claim to, but ultimately don’t succeed, not truly. Adrenaline, while great fun in its own right, is a game of carefully thinking about positioning and timing and resources. Doom: The Board Game may be action packed, but you’ll always have time to think through your actions before you move. Why then should Superhot succeed where those games have failed? Because here that thinking time makes sense.

Superhot Comparison

Superhot, the video game, while introducing us to a violent hatred of orange morph suits, had a unique selling point that made its conversion into tabletop form uniquely appropriate. In it, time only moves as you move. This means the white knuckle action you’d expect of a first person shooter is interspersed with silent, thoughtful moments as you stop… and so do all your enemies. It gives you time to consider the situation, to plan your next move, to dodge bullets. Those quiet moments of thought define the game and make it more about careful, thoughtful strategy than twitch responses. And careful, thoughtful strategy is what tabletop games excel at.

Lock and load

Superhot is most easily described as a deck builder, but is without doubt one of the most original takes on deck building I have ever come across. You face “the line”, a series of enemies and obstacles that represent the area close buy you. You have at your disposal initially nothing more than your fists and some fancy footwork, and if you can spend enough of the right symbol to match the target on the bottom of a card you’ll overcome that opponent. Two punches defeats the gun wielding baddie, say, or a few dodges takes you round the pillar. After that simple start, things get weird.

Superhot starting hand

Any cards from the line you defeat form the basis of your hand next turn. Each card in the game has rules at the top for use by the player, and in the bottom for when they are baddies in the line. So beating that gun-wielding orange voxel gives you his gun, the pillar becomes your cover next turn. It’s as clever and slick as its graphic design.

But now you’ve acted, you’ve done something, so sticking closely to the rules of the video game, time must advance. You count up the cards you’ve played and clear that many spaces from the line starting from the end by the discard pile, the end thematically closest to you, as you dash past them. Any enemies left in the line attack, making the playing of cards a puzzle of targeting and hand management.

But rather than going into the obstacles discard pile, like you might expect, those cards you run past go into your discard pile. The cards you play go into the obstacle discard pile, to be faced as enemies later. It creates a flow of cards from the line through your deck and back into the line again, with your choices of which cards you play and when, to take out which enemies and when and how quickly, influencing and shaping the resulting river of cards and combatants. It’s fascinating. A deck builder might have you managing your deck, Superhot has you managing the entire game!

Of course, that flow of cards is a confusing thing to get clear in your head. I find a flowchart clears things up nicely…

Superhot diagram

Bang Bang I shoot you down

I quietly mentioned attacks earlier without going into graphic details. Let me do that now. Attacks from enemies almost always come in the form of bullets (even unarmed morph suits add an extra bullet if another card shoots) which means it’s time to start dodging… Soon! Bullets come in their own special deck and get added to the obstacle discard pile so that later, when you’ve shuffled them up to make a new deck, they’ll come flying down the line towards you. Better have some dodging cards to hand.

Should you be hit, when the bullet reaches the end of the line, things aren’t over immediately, but life certainly gets harder. The bullet card goes into your hand permanently taking up one of the precious few spots you had available in the first place. There are some pliers out there somewhere which can smoothly remove such bullets (surgery left to your imagination) but they might not appear for a while, meanwhile nothing else has changed in intensity. It’s possible to survive and recover one hit, but two or more is incredibly hard. Four bullets kill you.

Often, particularly when you are new to the game, being shot is a death sentence postponed, leaving you forced to play out successive rounds at lower capacity even though the end can be inevitable. It’s an element I don’t much like about the game, better to come to an end quickly than drag it out. But when you do get good you are much more capable of handling the odd wound, even tactically taking a bullet where appropriate, adding a layer of flexibility that may be key to your success.

Superhot Bullet

Success, in Superhot, comes from completing objectives. In a shout out to computer gaming everywhere, you play a series of levels with increasing numbers of these objectives that come from the giant stack of cards provided. Objectives vary between killing a certain number of enemies, to having a hand of purely attack cards, to having three bullets in the line in a single turn to many, many more.

There is an impressive variety of these cards and most really get you thinking about how you need to manipulate things to bring them about. Having only attack cards in your hand requires careful play of your non-attack cards and probably a spot of luck with your draw deck. Yet the pressure of enemies in the line doesn’t let up so do you risk a few more bullets than you would otherwise? Do you wait for another opportunity? It’s when facing these objectives that you really put your control of the game to the test and that is fantastic!

Superhot objectives

What is less fantastic is that some present a challenge that is beyond your capacity to control. That “have 3 bullets in the line” example is infuriatingly difficult, not because of player choice, but simply because getting three bullets close enough together in the obstacle draw deck to achieve it is down far more to the luck of the shuffle than anything you have done. Objectives like that are a rare exception and they generally succeed in getting you thinking about the core challenge in different ways, sometimes spectacularly so!

Game Over

So Superhot is without doubt an exceptional mechanical experience and if that is what you look for in a solo game then I absolutely recommend you pick this up. The 2 player cooperative variant is rather good too, in which you alternate turns and can pass cards between you, opening up some interesting puzzle solving potential, although it seems like it may make the game slightly easier. And finally it even does justice to its source material, possibly a little too much justice.

Superhot hand

The one question I am left with when playing Superhot is… Why am I playing Superhot? There is no meaning behind your game. You’re not trying to help Robinson survive and eventually escape the island as in Friday, you’re not trying to save the Happy Islands from destruction in Nautilion, you’re just facing wave after wave of faceless orange constructs as you attempt to complete objectives so arbitrary they come on grey cards in 80s computer script. There’s no climactic end to the story, no story at all. That’s fine for what it is, a mechanical curio, and from what I understand it’s also pretty true of the video game. But that means it lacks some thematic hook to draw me back to the game, now that I’ve bested it. Superhot is still, absolutely, worth checking out, but it falls just short of perfect for me.

 

Rating: So Hot

 

My copy of Superhot was provided for review by the publisher, Board & Dice. Check out my thoughts on their other recent title, Pocket Mars, here.

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