Shotgun Cop Man is a strange platformer. You play as a square man with a round, bald head who’s chasing Satan to arrest him. At the beginning of each of the game’s nine worlds, Satan gives you the middle finger. And you don’t just use guns for fighting, but for traversal as well.
You start each world with two guns: a rapid-fire but weak pistol and a more powerful shotgun that only has three blasts. When you’re on the ground, your ammo constantly refills, meaning you essentially have infinite ammo. But when you’re in the air, if you run out of bullets, you won’t get a refill until you touch the ground.
This all matters because there’s no jump button. That means you get into the air by shooting your guns: the pistol lets you hover, while the shotgun can rocket you upward to reach high platforms. You can aim in any direction, so the shotgun can blast you backward and forward, too — it’s a speedy and fun way to get around. It’s all a little bit like Downwell, but sideways.
You’ll need to get around quickly to dodge Satan’s minions. Most often, you’ll take on little devils that spit bullets and are generally a nuisance. But there are a few more difficult enemies, such as flying sentient saws with one eye. There are bosses at the end of each world, too, like a flying skull with horns that can manifest a body to attack you with.
If you get hit by an enemy or stung by a spike, your heart will fly a short distance away from your body. If you get the heart back, you’ll survive another hit and the heart will float away again. It’s similar to a Sonic game, where you can take a hit so long as you have at least one ring. If you’re hit while your heart is out, you’ll die — though thanks to the game’s generous checkpoint system, you usually won’t start too far from where you were killed.
Each world has 17 short levels that are filled with typical platforming dangers including baddies, spikes, moving platforms, lasers, and block pushing puzzles. (Block shooting puzzles?) Individual levels generally take 30 seconds to a couple minutes to beat, so depending on how skillful you are with your guns, you can zip to the goal quickly and feel like a speedrunner.
You’ll frequently find new guns, too. I was a big fan of one that made bullets bounce off walls, which doubled as a useful puzzle-solving tool. The sniper rifle was a welcome upgrade because it could blast through multiple enemies at once.
Image: Devolver Digital
Visually, the game looks like a platformer in dark mode: black is the primary color, and enemies are generally a shade of red. Throughout the game, you’ll hear a persistent, thumping, and unnerving soundtrack that sounds like what you’d hear at some kind of Satan-worshipping club. The whole vibe makes you feel as if you’re actually descending into the pits of some dark hell.
My favorite part of the game was that you could accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. My full playthrough was about three and a half hours, and I could get through most of the nine worlds in about 20 or 30 minutes. I appreciated the brevity, because even though I very much enjoyed the game, the intentionally uncomfortable atmosphere got under my skin, and I could only play it in short bursts.
Once you understand how to navigate just with Shotgun Cop Man’s guns, you can really fly around the levels like some kind of cartoony action hero. By the end, you’ll use those guns to give the finger right back to Satan.
Shotgun Cop Man is now available on PC and Nintendo Switch.
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