Although the three games share a lot in common in terms of gameplay their tone couldn’t be more different. And that is a difficult question to answer. Shifty is better than the horribly disappointing sequel.

What fans of Hotline Miami’s classic 2D shooter action will want to know, is whether Mr. Although perhaps Jumper is the more relevant comparison, because Mr. Shifty: the game Hotline Miami and that bit at the beginning of X-Men 2 when Nightcrawler is in the White House (or alternatively the film Jumper, but not only did that film suck but it didn’t have a puff of smoke whenever the character teleported). There are two things which it is impossible not to mention when describing Mr. The latest Nindie game for the Nintendo Switch has a very obvious inspiration, but is it really a better sequel than Hotline Miami 2? Shifty (NS) – a warped version of Hotline Miami Even then, they’re not very common, and the game feels very polished all around.Mr. While playing, it’s ridiculously smooth, with lag spikes only ever being present in the later levels, when there are several enemies on and off the screen, along with several missile launchers exploding within short periods of each other. The game can be especially brutal with its checkpoint system, only ever saving each time you enter a new room through a door with a green light, so in the later levels, when a room can actually be two large rooms connected by a long corridor with several waves of strong enemies, if you get hit by the last missile before you can move on to the next room, you’ll have to do it all again.Īlthough the game crashed twice for me, it was never at a critical moment, once it was while leaving a level and once while leaving a room. Shifty is almost a parody of the spy genre.Įach level ends and starts in an elevator, with your typical elevator music playing, with level endings showing you how long you took for the level, and how many times you died, and level beginnings fading from elevator music to action movie guitar shredding as the doors open. With a brooding (but silent) badass spy protagonist with the tendency to make an explosive exit, Mr. Absurd things happen, and the characters don’t believe them either. However, the game never attempts to take itself seriously, which is one of its strengths. There is a very slim narrative that holds all the levels together, as you proceed up or down the tower of an evil corporate billionaire, filled with all sorts of spy clichés. Shifty does not really have is an in-depth story. Each level has a completely different layout, and each one brings a harder and more complex challenge than the last. Despite the enemies being quite similar, the levels never feel repetitive, which is quite impressive, due to the repetitive nature of this style of game. You’re always either on the run from lasers, punching a horde of enemies with machine guns out of the window on the higher floors of a skyscraper, teleporting your way around several missiles, or just trying to survive. Then everything slows down so that you can run around and punch that enemy right in the face, all while teleporting and killing other enemies before the slow-mo bar runs out and everything is back to its normal speed.Įven in the earlier levels, Mr Shifty almost never gives you more than a short moment to breathe. Once it’s full, it stays full until an enemy shoots at you. After each enemy you kill, the “slow-mo” bar is filled a bit, but starts decreasing again if you don’t keep filling it. Only in the last few levels does it ever get to a difficulty where rage-quitting is a considerable option, and even then, it’s still doable – you just have to get better, or as a lot of people would call it, “git gud”. The progression is fast enough to not get bored, but isn’t overwhelmingly fast, either. It starts off easy, with few enemies that can only fire single shots, then progresses to melee enemies that are harder to kill, normal enemies with machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and later even ninjas.

Shifty does well is the difficulty curve. Then you have to wait for all of them to regenerate. Teleports, however, aren’t unlimited, as you have a maximum of five to use, which regenerate after a short period of time, unless you use all of them. Move around with the left joystick, move the camera a bit with the right joystick, attack with one button, use or pick up items with another button, and teleport with a third button. The Nintendo Switch version seems to be one of the few games to use the HD Rumble feature so far, and it uses it fairly well, with different types of rumble for different impact, or explosions. Shifty is a top-down action game developed for the Nintendo Switch and PC by Team Shifty.

Mr shifty game