Shotgun Cop Man Review

 From DeadToast Entertainment, which brought you My Friend Pedro, comes a new adventure filled with blood, bullets, and significantly less bananas: Shotgun Cop Man. I’ll be frank, I saw the uncanny face and name first, thought it looked stupid, and put my name down to review the game. Didn’t even check who made it to get a good idea of the quality on display. Sometimes, you just want to dive into something really dumb blind and see what’s on the other side.

In this precision platformer, you play as the titular Shotgun Cop Man (who I will assume is his full legal name), who's going through Hell (literally) to arrest Satan. That's the entire story. To be honest, all the dialogue is just Shotgun Cop Man swearing he'll arrest Satan followed by the Devil himself flying in, saying “Fuck You, Shotgun Cop Man”, flipping him off, and leaving. It's kinda funny the first time, but after the third time (out of, like, 11 cutscenes), it's better to skip the dialogue to get into the action quicker. And who doesn’t love action?

This is 98% of his dialogue.

Diving into Hell, you’ll be faced with a variety of demons and death traps, but there’s nothing a gun can’t conquer (and shoot into a bloody mess). The main tools that will consistently be on your side are a pistol and a shotgun. Aside from shooting demons in the face, they’re mainly used in the platforming. The shotgun is for big jumps and redirection in mid-air, while the pistol is more useful for small hops and hovering, but can be replaced with other sidearms like flamethrowers, miniguns, SMGs, lasers, or a second shotgun. There are a surprising number of weapons with different properties and uses, with some even necessary for puzzles to get through the stage. It feels good using all these guns, too, especially your main shotgun. Despite how it may sound, using the shotgun to propel yourself through the air while blasting demons is surprisingly intuitive. At no point did I feel like I lost control of my character or the game punished me for existing. Whatever mistakes I made were because of a screw-up I did, and I never really felt any anger, just resetting to try again.

It’s sort of shocking how forgiving the game is despite its fast pace. Oh, you’ll die quite a bit, but there is some leeway that makes you a lot harder to kill than you’d think. If you get hurt, you can regain your health by retrieving the heart you leave behind. Get hurt again while heartless, and it's back to the last checkpoint. For most levels, I’d prefer a complete reset so I can get another chance at perfecting a stage but I did appreciate the thought. It’s not like it will take very long to get back to where I was, considering every level only takes 30 seconds to a minute to beat, even if you aren’t going for the Speedrun challenge. Heck, the longest map in the game was the final boss, and even then it only took five minutes.

Guns, at the end of the day, are tools. Just really fun to use.

There are over 150 levels in the game, always introducing a new gun, obstacle, or enemy type to deal with every couple of stages. I only really identified two types though: platforming (get to the end) and kill rooms (kill all enemies to unlock the exit). If you think that isn’t enough, there’s a level editor where you can create, share, and download more, and it’s fully integrated into the Steam Workshop, so installing and playing is only a click away. However, because of how short the levels are, I barely noticed there were 150 in the game, so the total playtime is only around four hours. That includes all the deaths, resets, and pausing to step away or change settings. You can replay stages to perfect them by killing all enemies, not getting hit, and beating them under a certain time all at once, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.

This ain't a killing house, it's a killing bungalow.

I didn’t run into any issues for my playthrough: it ran at 60 FPS all the way through. The only gripe I have is that levels had the same sort of crimson red hue and pipes all throughout. It went by quickly enough that it didn’t become monotonous, but I’d like more colours included. Finally, I sort of wanted cutscenes to play only once, not every time I reset. This is just me scraping the bottom of the barrel for complaints, though, so don't take it too seriously.

I DIYEH

Shotgun Cop Man is just dumb fun. It’s short with some great speedrunning potential. I would’ve liked funnier dialogue than “Fuck You” in every cutscene, but don’t think better one-liners is all that necessary. Why would you want anything else from a game called Shotgun Cop Man?