Hossam Taibi Posted July 21, 2020 Share Posted July 21, 2020 What is it? A standalone, roguelike twist on SuperhotExpect to pay: £20/$25Developer: SUPERHOT TeamPublisher: SUPERHOT TeamReviewed on: GTX 1060, AMD Fx-4130, 8GB RAMMultiplayer? No Get hit by a stray shot: dead. Repeat. Run out of bullets: dead. Repeat. Take a gun to the back of your head: dead. Repeat. Each death in Superhot expansion Mind Control Delete resets the board and generates a fresh gauntlet of slow-motion, first-person gunfights to brawl through. Standalone expansion Mind Control Delete replaces Superhot's fast-paced action flick format with a series of practically endless, procedurally-generated temporal skirmishes. The expansion fancies itself as something of a roguelike, but the same combat rules apply: stop moving, and time will freeze to a near-standstill. The moment you start looking around, interacting with the world or (heaven forbid) sprinting all over the shop, time speeds up to match your velocity. The system still generates frenetic action scenes. I start, for instance, by smashing a fish tank to hurl sea life at the first foe. Before the first cod has slapped its mark, I’m leaning over a sofa to pick up a shotgun, filling a swordsman’s gut with buckshot before spinning to beat down a pipe-welding ambusher. Impossible in real-time; graceful in slow motion. Mind Control Delete has plenty of mood-setting to get through first, but when the expansion finally plays its hand hand it confronts you with a sprawling map of challenges nodes, upgrades, and occasional lore dumps. Each node gives you a handful of brawls to fight your way out of. Get to the end, and you can push on to the next one. To accommodate this gauntlet, the devs have made a few changes to the Superhot formula. Rather than going down in one hit, you’ve now got a pool of three hearts to see you through each run (with the occasional mid-run reprieve to recharge or upgrade your health tally). That does mean you want to pick health bonuses over any of the other Hacks the game offers up, mind, though the others can be quite tempting. Hacks can grant you anything from faster movement speed to a guaranteed gun or katana at the start of each fight. You find fancier Hacks as you dig through the map. Some let your shots pierce enemies, or give you the power to deflect every bullet in the arena at once. Each comes with a brief tutorial map when acquired, giving you a chance to experiment before you pick one mid-run. Longer missions let you earn Cores—fundamental traits that you apply at the very start of a run. The first Core mission tasks you with a three map prison break. Succeed and you can take a leaping charge ability into the rest of the game. Superhot’s glitched-out story about control, conspiracies and illegal ROMs returns, providing a narrative structure that keeps MCD from going full Spelunky. You’re always diving deeper into the machine, whether that’s to dig out more cryptic text or another handy upgrade. The text sections create a haunting atmosphere, even if they are thin on actual plot, but the desire to see more kept me going even as the repetition set in. See, Mind Control Delete can be bloody repetitive. The absolute minimalism of the visuals helps the arenas melt into the background, and all those traits and twists help spice up individual skirmishes, but you are very much still fighting the same assortment of blokes on the same round of maps. Outside of those small Hack and Core tutorials, you’re also missing the original’s more deliberate fights. There’s no punching your way out of a packed elevator here. Every fight, by necessity, is a moderately-sized brawl in a fairly-spacious arena where foes come from all directions. Superhot’s campaign was short enough that you never spent too long in one place, either. But after an hour of Mind Control Delete, I’d seen the same dojos, garages and penthouse suites ten times over. You also miss those tasty snippets of scene-setting from the original. There’s no deal gone wrong, the bartender isn’t reaching for his gun. Each fight begins and ends without context, cutting to the next one at a seemingly arbitrary kill count. But if you finished Superhot wanting more, Mind Control Delete offers just that. It's great for popping in and out of a handful of brawls during a lunch break, knowing that each gauntlet survived ensures more tools and more challenges for the next day’s run. Mind Control Delete is a great chance to jump back into Superhot with fresh eyes, to relearn the game’s rhythm’s and untangle a fresh new web of fake internet conspiracies. If you’re not up for the job, though… well, there will always be another mind willing to take control. Superhot: Mind Control Delete, a standalone expansion of the original 2013 game, is a strange beast. It’s been in early access since 2017 and recently had its official release, but the final version only somewhat feels like a new game. I recently had a chance to chat with a few members of the Superhot team, and the thought process behind Mind Control Delete was fairly straightforward: They wanted to create a game you could play for hours and hours, instead of the linear, more authored experiences of past Superhot games. Since the team didn’t have the bandwidth to make hundreds of levels, they instead built a variety of environments with interchangeable elements, from placement of different elements within that themed space, to the number and timing of your enemies, to weapons and the placement of the player in the level. Each level is no longer a carefully authored, planned experience, but instead a procedurally generated environment based on a series of themes. You’ll often be fighting in something that looks like a club, for example, but the layout of that club is going to vary in multiple ways. This also means that levels no longer only spawn enemies where the player can see them, meaning that in Mind Control Delete, there will be times when a random henchman shoots you in the back, possibly before you can even tell they’re there. The doors found in each level can also spawn enemies, much like the fabled monster closets of Doom 3. This trade-off may be controversial for fans of the series. You now have three hearts that act as your health, and each node on the overworld map is made up of a series of levels that all must be survived if you want to move ahead. There are also new powers to unlock throughout the game, such as the ability to turn throwable objects into explosives or an upgrade that gives each gun more rounds. Each node, with its multiple levels, allows you to equip a few of these abilities, giving you a choice of two from the pool of unlocked powers. So sometimes you might take damage and feel like there was little you could have done about it, but with sly use of your abilities and a clear head, you can certainly decrease the odds of that happening. But, to be clear, they are odds. There were a few times where I felt like I did everything right and burnt through my hearts anyway. This only sends you back to the beginning of that particular node, not the entire game. Once I began to understand how to maximize my chances at survival through each run, I began to believe Captain Picard’s immortal words on the subject: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” Superhot: Mind Control Delete is an uncomfortable release in some ways, having been born out of what was supposed to be DLC for the first game, given away to anyone who already owned the original game on PC, and currently being offered as a standalone game or as a bundle with one or both of the other Superhot games at a deep discount. If I were put in charge of the game’s pricing, I would likely quit and try to find an easier job. Still, being able to stop time by standing still remains fun, and now there are so many more changing conditions that force me to adapt my strategy from one moment to the next, allowing the game to keep my attention even when the levels begin to feel familiar. Getting a lucky choice of upgrades near the end of a run is always a thrill. Here are the SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2,40 GHz CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 10 VIDEO CARD: GeForce GTX 650 (1024 MB Ram) PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 4 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1024 MB SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE Recommended Requirements CPU: Intel Core I5-4440 3,10 GHz CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 10 VIDEO CARD: GeForce GTX 660 (2048 MB Ram) PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 4 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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