You get hit by a stray bullet and die. Repeat. Running out of bullets: Die. Repeat. Shot in the back of the head: Dead. Repeat: In Superhot's expansion, "Mind Control Delete," the board resets each time you die, and a slow-motion, first-person firefight ensues.
The standalone expansion Mind Control Delete replaces Superhot's fast-paced action flick format with a procedurally generated series of virtually endless temporal skirmishes. This extended version pretends to be a roguelike, but the combat rules are the same. As you look around, interact with the world, and sprint through the store, time accelerates to match your speed.
This system still produces frenetic action scenes. For example, I start by breaking the tank and throwing sea creatures at the first enemy. Before the first cod is pummeled, I lean over the couch, pick up my shotgun, and fire a buckshot into the swordsman's belly before spinning around and punching the pipe-welding ambusher down. Impossible in real time, but graceful in slow motion.
Mind Control Delight has plenty to get you in the mood first, but when the extended edition finally gets to grips with it, you're confronted with a sprawling map filled with challenge nodes, upgrades, and the occasional lore dump. At each node, a handful of brawls await you to fight through. If you make it to the end, you can move on.
To accommodate this ordeal, the developers made several changes to Superhot's formula. Instead of going down in a single blow, the player can pool three hearts to survive a single playthrough (and recharge or upgrade their strength along the way). However, other hacks are quite appealing as well. Hacks range from faster movement speeds to guaranteeing a gun or katana at the start of a battle.
As you dig through the map, you will find fancier hacks. Some will make your shots penetrate the enemy, while others give you the power to deflect all bullets in the arena at once. Each of these has a brief tutorial map when you acquire it, so try it out before you pick it halfway. Longer missions will give you cores. Core is a basic characteristic and is applied at the beginning of a run. In the first Core mission, you are tasked with a jailbreak consisting of three maps. If successful, the player can use the leaping charge ability for the remainder of the game.
To keep things fair, mind control removal begins to remix the way the bad guys work. As before, you'll encounter enemies who run and shoot blindly, but can't steal weapons right away, and porcelain dudes who have to hit a red-glowing weak spot to do damage.
Superhot's glitched stories about control, intrigue, and illegal ROMs are back, providing a narrative structure that keeps MCD from becoming Spelunky. Whether it's to dig up more cryptic texts or useful upgrades, you're always diving deep into the machine. The actual plot may be thin, but the textual portions are haunting and atmospheric.
You see, "Mind Control Deleted" is bloody repetitive. The absolute minimalism of the visuals helps blend the arena into the background, and every feature and twist helps spice up the individual skirmishes, but you're still fighting the same faces on the same map in the same round. Gone, too, are the more deliberate fights of the original, except for small hacks and core tutorials.
There is no punching your way out of a packed elevator. All fights are inevitably moderately sized brawls in a fairly large arena with enemies coming from all directions; Superhot's campaign is short, so you don't stay in one place too long. However, after watching an hour of "Mind Control Delite," I watched the same dojo, garage, and penthouse suite ten times over. I also miss the delicious bits of scene-setting that were present in the original. No deals go wrong or bartenders reach for their guns. Each fight begins and ends without context, cutting to the next in a seemingly arbitrary number of kills.
But if you've finished "Superhot" and want more, "Mind Control Delete" offers just that. It's the perfect game for repeatedly entering and exiting brawls during your lunch break.
Mind Control Delete is a great chance to return to Superhot with fresh eyes, relearn the rhythm of the game, and unravel a new web of fake Internet intrigue. But if you're not up to the task...
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