Shotgun Cop Man Review
Shotgun Cop Man costs six cents per stage and at this value, it's hard to be upset at any of its shortcomings. Shotgun Cop Man is exactly what you would expect to get if you put Devolver Digital in a blender with Deadtoast, the studio behind 2019’s My Friend Pedro.
The platforming is satisfying, addicting and refined, but best enjoyed in short sessions. The bosses are unique, but there is too much monotony in between. There are 162 stages, but there is a lack of variety across many facets of the experience. For every pro, there is a con, but Shotgun Cop Man isn’t here to win awards. He’s here to kick ass and take names on his quest to arrest satan in the bowels of Hell.
Shotgun Cop Man is aware of what it is and at this price point is precisely what you expect and need it to be: A fast, frenetic and weird action platfomer with refined gameplay. Unfortunately, it's a little shallow on depth, variety and isn't the follow up to My Friend Pedro that was expected.
What is Shotgun Cop Man?
Shotgun Cop Man is a fusion of precision platformer, but in the place of jumping and running, you will be using your shotgun and its kinetic force to propel yourself around each stage with the occasional assistance of a secondary weapon. The premise is simple, you are Shotgun Cop Man and you are going to hell to arrest Satan. In one hand you have a shotgun with a magazine of three bullets that gets reloaded everytime you touch the ground and a pistol with 8 bullets that reloads slowly. The pistol can keep you in the air, but it’s more about doing the secondary tasks.
You need the explosive nature of your shotgun to move around the level because your legs are too stubby to jump. You move with the left joystick, shoot your shotgun with the left trigger, aim with the right joystick and shoot your secondary with the right trigger. That's all the controls. You will find other weapons that have limited ammo from machine guns, spread shooters and other shotguns, but they don’t change the experience in any drastic manner.
The part that you will need to wrap your head around is that you will have to aim opposite of the direction that you want to go. Shotgun Cop Man would likely be challenging enough with just the precision platforming by way of shotgun, but you will also need to eliminate hordes of demons at the same time.
As mentioned there are 162 stages spread across 9 different levels. Each level has 17 stages with the end being the boss encounter and there is also level zero, which only has a handful of levels. Level zero serves as your tutorial for the game and you try to grasp the mechanics.
Whats Good About Shotgun Cop Man?
The levels in Shotgun Cop Man are addicting and bite size. Each level has a suggested time to beat, which at most was around a minute and a half, but most were drastically less. They are fun, they are challenging, but always within reason and they feature good checkpoints.
As mentioned with over 162 levels, there is a strong value proposition if you like challenging platformers. If you divide the cost of 9.99USD, it works out to 6 cents per level. At minimum, each level will take you about a minute, but there will be levels that take multiple attempts. When you average it out, you are probably looking at around a minute and a half to two minutes, which means you should get anywhere between 4-6 hours just to complete the game.
Then there are the challenges to complete on each level. There are three objectives that you need to accomplish: No Damage, Kill Everything, and Speedrun. If you complete all three of these objectives, you have mastered the stage and trying to get this on each of the 162 stages will definitely keep you busy longer. On the 17th stage of each level, there will be a boss fight, which gives Shotgun Cop Man a injection of well needed variety and challenge.
Whats not Good About Shotgun Cop Man?
The biggest drawback to Shotgun Cop Man was amount of repetition in all aspects of the game. The platforming didn’t overly evolve from one level to the next. At the start, you’re shotgun jumping over spikes and tall towers and at the end you are doing the same thing. There are plenty of other things you will do with lasers and switches, but over the course of 162 levels, it didn’t have enough variety. I actually think that if each of the nine levels had less than 17 stages, it would’ve felt more succinct.
The environments all felt very similar with color palettes that were hard to differentiate. I think a simple fix or improvement, would have been to have a distinct color palette on each level or something that truly indicated you were descending deeper into hell. The soundtrack was also repetitive. Im not positive, but i’m pretty sure there is only one song in the game, which is a high BPM electronic track. It pairs well with the games fast and frenetic movements, but it grew tiresome. A distinctly different track from each of the nine levels would have gone a long way. The last area that could have used a little more variation were the enemies as they were mostly floating red minions or a slight variation of one.
Even Satan himself would always say the same thing at the start of each level. The humor is not lost on me with him telling Shotgun Cop Man how he truly feels about him, but when there is so much repetition throughout, it just exacerbates the problem.
SHOTGUN COP MAN VERDICT
I am a little surprised that Shotgun Cop Man feels like a step backwards for DeadToast after My Friend Pedro, but I'm also not upset because at ten dollars, my expectations were met. I was expecting a short game with attitude, precise controls and a lot of killing and that’s exactly what Shotgun Cop Man is. Shotgun Cop Man is best used is smaller doses, but could easily serve as a nice palette cleanser between heaver titles. Shotgun Cop Man is weird, addictive, inexpensive and exactly what you need from Devolver and DeadToast.
