If you follow GameTyrant on Twitch, you know that I've been playing a lot of Mr. Shifty as of late. While it might be premature to say, this game is really putting up a fight to be one of my top games of 2017! That doesn't mean it's perfect, mind you, but it's does a lot of things right.
Story
Mr. Shifty is an agent working for an unnamed organization to steal a deadly weapon from the grasp of an evil villain. While Mr. Shifty has no dialogue, there are plenty of text boxes to be had between his correspondent in his ear and the villain...who's name wasn't relevant enough for me to remember. This is your typical beat em up story, and while it doesn't do anything to hinder the story, everything about it is fairly forgettable.
Gameplay
Do you play Hotline Miami? This game is very similar in style except instead of having a gun, you have superhuman abilities. Mr. Shifty is a super strength hero with the teleportation ability of X-Men's Nightcrawler and it's an amazing combination. You'll phase in and out of bullets and force enemies to react or be taken out by your ultra punching ability! One of my favorite parts of this game is that the enemies are prone to friendly fire so phasing in between two guys can cause a lot of chaos or one trigger-happy enemy to kill 4 oh his comrades. It starts out as a fun gimmick but becomes a necessity in the later levels.
Things start off easy but get difficult quick. This game isn't all about beating up enemies either as it also features some light puzzle solving and quick reflexes in order to progress further into the facility that will challenge your skills with a controller! Take one shot or hit and you're dead, so suffice to say you'll restart some areas a fair bit, but it's never frustrating. If you manage to string enough combos between enemies you'll unlock a super slow motion ability that really helps you out in a pinch. That said, the ability automatically activates when an enemy shoots in your direction and more often than not forces you into scrambling to make something out of it rather than making it work for you.
Sound
The music and sound of the game are unnoticeable, which is not at all a bad thing. I definitely never felt like a track droned on too long or that something wasn't mixed right, but there also wasn't anything that particularly stuck out to me that I feel worth mentioning in the review.
Visuals
Cel Shaded graphics, top-down style, this isn't a game that's going to give your graphics card any trouble. That's a good thing considering how fast the gameplay is, you wouldn't want a performance lag disrupting any of the gameplay in this game. The colors are bright, and I'm a big fan of the destructible environments. Not sure what more I can say...what you see in the pictures is what you get.
Replayability
Depends on the type of gamer you are. If you're someone who wants to see if they can beat every level without dying, you'll be replaying sections of this game a lot! I personally have yet to achieve that goal so I can't say for certain whether there's a reward involved for doing so, but it doesn't appear that is the case.
What It Could Have Done Better
I know the Switch version is currently suffering from some frame rate issues that should be patched sometime in the near future, but as far as the PC version my complaints regarding this game are few. As I reached the end of the game I definitely had an urge to want more than what the game provided in content. The levels offered are more than fair for a game that retails as $14.99, mind you, but I would love to play a longer sequel if TinyBuild has it in them in the future.
Verdict:
Mr. Shifty is a solid game that draws from other games and pop culture to create something entirely new and fun. While I'd like to see a more developed sequel, or perhaps even additional content added to the base game, I'm more than satisfied with this game for the $14.99 it runs.
