Big budget action games really want to impress me. When I play something like Monster Hunter Wilds, I’m taken aback by the sheer scope and spectacle of it all as I slay enormous monsters while lightning strikes around me. That technical ambition is often matched by a narrative one too. Dynasty Warriors: Origins doesn’t just deliver thousands of soldiers for me to carve up; it aims to tell a dense story about fighting for peace. A lot of modern action games almost seem embarrassed of the fact that they’re asking you to shed so much blood, turning that action into a self reflection on the nature of violence. It’s the odd side effect of an industry that’s trying to deliver greater thrills and more nuanced writing in the same breath.
Shotgun Cop Man doesn’t care about any of that. Shotgun Cop Man just wants to shoot guns and arrest Satan.
Developed by DeadToast Entertainment, Shotgun Cop Man is an action game in its purest form. It takes a simple premise, one that has players jumping only by shooting, and executes it in a laser-focused fashion across 150 bite-sized levels. It is small, dumb, and proud. In a landscape where so many games in its genre now come with some sort of asterisk, Shotgun Cop Man is an unapologetic blast that packs everything I could want from an action game into one $10 package.
It’s not going to take long for me to explain Shotgun Cop Man to you. There’s a cop who loves shotguns. He goes to Hell on a quest to detain Satan. Satan absolutely hates the guy. That’s it. There’s no pontificating on the nature of violence here. It’s just a few hours of fast-paced demon shooting in which two lines of dialogue separate each of its nine worlds — and one of those lines is always “F*** you, Shotgun Cop Man!” It’s truly and purposefully stupid in the most elegant way possible.
The action hook is just as easy to explain. Shotgun Cop Man can not jump; he can only shoot guns. The man knows what he likes. Luckily, his shotgun is powerful enough to propel him through the air. If I point it at the ground and shoot, he jumps into the air. If I hold it to my left, he’ll launch right. It’s like It’s more like I’m piloting a spaceship than moving a little guy around screen. DeadToast refers to the game as a “precision platformer” and that descriptor tracks as I need to carefully send my gruff pal over spike pits and through spinning lasers.
While its lo-fi visuals look worlds apart from DeadToast’s previous game, the flashier My Friend Pedro, the exact same DNA is present here. Each level is an action-platforming gauntlet where I need to shoot his way through obstacles while killing demons. That’s a careful ballet considering that any shotgun blast intended to take out a monster will send him flying across the screen too, though secondary weapons like pistols don’t have that same recoil. Combat, mobility, and puzzle solving are one in the same here, so I never need to stop moving once I get the hang of it all. Levels take no more than a minute to complete (and I’m sure that speedrunners will only need mere seconds), giving me short jolts of adrenaline 150 times over.
As I tore through the entire thing in three hours, a serious question come across my mind: What more do I need from an action game? I mean, really! Shotgun Cop Man may not crowd the screen with a billion particle effects or loud sound design like a big budget action game would, but does any of that spectacle actually make a game better? Blasting through the air as a glorified stick figure feels just as exciting as cutting down thousands of people in Dynasty Warriors. It feels like the video game equivalent of a formalist film, cutting the pomp and circumstance of the genre down to its bare essentials. A threadbare story, simple visuals, and a satisfying shooting hook is all it needs to create a wickedly fun shooter.
Like so many great games in Devolver Digital’s publishing catalogue, Shotgun Cop Man isn’t going for sophistication. It is more than happy to sit in the cheap seats among gaming’s rowdiest fans. It is a proud piece of low art, though that term undersells just how much work DeadToast put in here. This is an expertly designed action-platformer with tight, speed-based movement and clean level design that takes advantage of the core hook in enough ways to keep levels fresh. It can only parade its minimalist silliness as confidently as it can because it knows that it has the action to back it up.
Sometimes it’s not the size or complexity of a game that matters, but how much ass it kicks. And Shotgun Cop Man kicks a lot of demon ass. That’s kind of his entire thing.
Shotgun Cop Man launches on May 1 for Nintendo Switch and PC.