Mr Shifty. Hotline Miami with a twist…

Mr Shifty is a top down shooter game but without the guns. Published by Double Fine and developed by Team Shifty. You play as Mr Shifty who looks oddly like Aiden Pearce from Watch_Dogs, Mr Shifty has the power to “Shift” (teleport) one foot in any direction, as well as being a master fighter seeing he can knock out his enemies in 2-3 punches. You go through multiple rooms on a floor warping and knocking out all the baddies until you get to the elevator to take you up to the next floor as you ascend a tower. Pretty simple.

After each level you are rewarded with a nice elevator scene with your time and death count for the floor as well as how far through the game you are as shown by the tower on the right hand side. The music as you go from floor to floor as well as the music on the levels are well suited and fit the theme of the x-men thematic vibe very well.

The combat is smooth with it’s well made fast based teleportation as well as the quick paced punches and melee combat with the items you can pick up. The instant restarts and 1 hit will kill you is what gives off the classic Hotline Miami feeling which works very well for Mr Shifty.

The art style is very well done with it’s bright colors and low realistic cel-shaded look, it fits the game very nicely, but some may tend to disagree with the cel-shaded choice. Yet the animation quality which is perfectly done helps it as well.

Mr Shifty is quite hectic yet very challenging and not in the unfair way. Checkpoints are more then abundant so you may lose a room or 2 worth of progress which translates to maybe 1 minute. However there is one major downside to Mr Shifty and that is the puzzles, there are some puzzles on some floors that feel slow and they just don’t fit within the game as well as the rest of it.

The length isn’t great either, maybe 3-4 hours campaign is comparable to a good day of fun but nothing past that. But it does not fail at making you feel like a bad ass in those 3-4 hours. I recommend if you are bored for the day, pick this up as it will occupy you for most of it and you will have fun playing Mr Shifty.