With your hands full of guns and a warrant for the Devil’s arrest in your pocket, Shotgun Cop Man sends you on a nonstop blitz of new ideas. This short and sweet action-platformer continually reinvents itself across 10 clever worlds, leaving little room for a good idea to get stale. Once I mastered its distinct style of projectile-based movement, barrelling through the circles of hell turned into a pure power fantasy. Even though it’s harder than it should be to chase high scores and better times, I still had a blast gunning for a more optimized run after the credits rolled.
Shotgun Cop Man’s goofy vibes, flashy acrobatics, and time attack setup transported me back to my middle school days of bypassing the browser security settings in the computer lab to sneak in runs of Flash games like Fancy Pants Adventures or Electricman 2. Granted, this would blow many of those study hall time killers out of the water, but I could still easily see myself racing to the end of its first world with a friend while we’re supposed to be working on a research paper or math homework. It shares the same tight scope and paired back tone, but here those mask a surprisingly deep platformer.
Shotgun Cop Man isn’t just a standard run-n-gun shoot-em-up. Instead, the recoil from your shotgun serves as the driving force behind most of the movement. Need to take out some demons to your right? Well, you better make sure the coast is clear to your left when you pull the trigger. This challenging, but ultimately rewarding, system of ballistic blowback fills in for genre-standards like jumping or dashing midair, while firing your sidearm — which ranges from a satisfyingly snappy but weak pistol to a powerful gatling gun — allows you to hover midair or make more precise hops.
You can’t just spray and pray you wind up on the next platform, though. Each weapon has limited ammo, keeping Shotgun Cop Man relatively grounded: the shotgun itself only holds three shells at a time, so he needs to touch terra firma to reload. That said, sidearms tend to have bigger magazines, allowing for a reliable second option to fall back on when you need to get to the ground and take another shot at a tough jump. This restrained approach brings a levelheaded balance to Shotgun Cop Man that encourages mayhem and speed without leaving precision and skill in the dust.
To make matters more difficult, Shotgun Cop Man also has to contend with the armies of Hell as he chases down their leader. Aside from a few combat-focused levels that blend each circle of Hell’s unique mechanics into an arena-style showdown, as well as the requisite boss that shows up at the end of each 17-level world, Shotgun Cop Man is all about movement. Because of that, enemies play second fiddle here, being treated as platforming obstacles masterfully woven into each level. They act like the bright-red explosive barrels of a 3D shooter, providing the satisfaction of popping them while offering direction on where and when to shoot. Shotgun Cop Man bets big on its platforming acumen rather than falling in-line with other action platformer successes like Katana Zero, and it pays off in spades.
Still, this unique movement takes quite some time to get used to, especially if you’re playing with a controller: Pointing in two different directions like a twin-stick shooter (left for walking, right for aiming) makes for an unnatural platformer control scheme. Wrapping my head around it felt like being asked to rub my belly and pat my head at the same time. Unfortunately, there’s really no better way to make this specific type of movement work on the sticks, though it is much more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse. Thankfully, Shotgun Cop Man’s accessibility features allow you to skip certain inputs, like making it so you pick up new sidearms automatically, so you can tweak things to be much more comfortable.
I was halfway through the roughly five hour campaign by the time I felt like I’d fully climbed its relatively steep learning curve, mastering this propulsion-based blend of combat and movement. Normally, this initial struggle would be a knock against it, but Shotgun Cop Man constantly introduces and innovates on new ideas while rewarding your growing mastery of them. It also sets up systems that successfully encouraged me to obsessively replay levels in an attempt to shave nanoseconds off my time. This potent blend dangles an appetizing carrot-on-a-stick to gnash at in bite-sized speedruns once you’ve found your footing.
When he inevitably takes a hit, Shotgun Cop Man’s heart comically pops out of his body. Running into it will pick it up and restore health, but he’ll die in one hit without it. When that happens, the camera zooms in on his oddly detailed face as he says, “I die,” in a goofy, computerized voice. This minimal, self-aware sense of humor sets the tone overall, as there’s otherwise not much of a premise to explain here (and developer Dead Toast Entertainment even pokes fun at this in the credits by putting quotes around the word “Story”). You’re a cop with a shotgun trying to arrest the Devil. Naturally, Old Scratch doesn’t play ball. Each time our hero catches up to him, Satan tells the boy in blue to shove it, and you continue on your chase once more. It’s thin, but it works, and is just amusing enough to keep things moving.
Unfortunately, that sense of humor eventually becomes Shotgun Cop Man’s Waterloo. Each time it zooms in on his face as he points out the obvious, it takes far too long to get back into the action. It takes as many as three button presses to respawn, and even longer to restart a level. I know how silly this sounds in the face of everything Shotgun Cop Man gets right, but in a game where you’ll be dying and trying again quite a bit, these add up to completely hamper any sense of momentum. That’s especially glaring when every level in Shotgun Cop Man grades your performance on whether or not you killed every enemy, beat the par time, took any damage, or did all three of those in the same run. In what feels like a big oversight, there’s no quick level restart button when you die, so to chase that perfect run, you need to resume the level after that death, pause, and then hit the retry option from there. Because Shotgun Cop Man trades in seconds and milliseconds (most levels took me less than a minute to complete), this otherwise small bump in the road became an outsized, unnecessary part of mastering each level.
That said, for a game that only took me about five hours to see from end to end, Shotgun Cop Man crams in a staggeringly impressive range of innovations and spins on its seemingly simple run-and-shoot formula. It ricochets from idea to idea, never allowing a mechanic to get old — in fact, there are quite a few I wish got some more time to shine, like reactive floors, which alternate between safe and deadly each time they’re shot, or clever box-moving puzzles that put your understanding of each weapon’s power to the test. Most mechanics get a chance to shine before being woven into more new mechanics later on, but there’s also an impressive level creator (exclusive to the PC version) that lets you toy with some of these ideas yourself if you feel like your favorite didn’t get its time in the sun.
I’m not much of a level designer myself, but the creation suite provides a robust toy chest for dedicated designers to mess around with. It doesn’t just feature tools that enable you to recreate or expand upon any clever idea found in the campaign, it even includes wholly unique mechanics that aren’t found there, like extra enemy and NPC types. I didn’t get to try any user-created levels during the pre-release period, but I’m really excited to see what people think up once Shotgun Cop Man is out in the wild.
