Take the 2D stylings of Super Meat Boy, remove the jump button, and throw in more guns than you can shake a stick at. That’s the basic recipe for Shotgun Cop Man, the new game from DeadToast Entertainment (the makers of My Friend Pedro). It’s a minimalistic precision platformer where your movement is controlled almost entirely by blasting your big shotgun. It’s fast, movement-based mayhem, and a whole lot of fun.

You’re the titular Shotgun Cop Man, a broad-shouldered blob with a strange 3D face plastered on. You are, of course, on a mission into hell to arrest Satan. To do that, you’ll blast through progressive levels of varying sizes, through nine different worlds. You can walk slowly left to right, but any other movement requires using the knock-back from your weapons. Your primary weapon will do small hops or let you hover mid-air while you fire, and your shotgun will blast you away from wherever you shoot.

A man of few words and many bullets

Of course, you’ll also be using your weapons to take out enemies throughout the levels, which is where it gets tricky. You’re constantly juggling the competing needs of platforming and combat as you progress. If you’ve got a roof of spikes above your head, shooting an enemy below you will blast you straight into it, so first you need to reposition yourself, and then take them out. You’ve also got a limited number of shots in each weapon before you need to reload, which you can only do on the ground.

So the dance of Shotgun Cop Man lies in finding the balance between manoeuvring yourself around the world, dodging hazards and bullets, and taking out enemies as you go, all while managing your ammo before landing again. It takes a little while to get into, but once it clicks, the loop is addictive. It’s the classic plan-and-execute loop of a precision platformer where you map out the level in your head and then try to run it perfectly.

If you take any damage, you’ll lose whatever primary weapon you had picked up, and a heart will appear around the area you got hit. You also get a small window of invincibility to re-situate yourself. If you can pick that heart back up, you can take a hit and repeat the process – but if you get hit again, you die. It’s an elegant approach to the difficulty curve because avoiding all damage remains tricky, but in most levels, you can scrape through by collecting your heart and retrying whatever section you’re at.

There are also very generous checkpoints throughout the levels, meaning that if you do end up dying, usually you’re only a moment behind where you were. This is fantastic if there’s a section that really stumps you, because you can keep retrying it without redoing the entire level over and over again. There’s a fantastic balance between difficulty and approachability here, and if you want an easier experience, there are accessibility options like lowering the game speed that you can access.

Through the layers of hell

Each of the nine worlds introduces new mechanics to the game, through some really clever level design that naturally guides you through how they work. There’s destructible ground, saw blades, lasers, pipes that can transport you (or your bullets) straight through them, and a whole bunch more. It’s pretty standard platforming fare, but they’re used to great effect with the core mechanics – for the most part.

Devilishly difficult

Each level has 4 additional challenges to complete, and this is where the difficulty really comes in. There’s one for killing every enemy, one for beating the level within a set timeframe, one for taking no damage, and one for doing all three of those in the same run. For some levels, this is easy, but for others it’s very, very difficult. Especially in some of the more bullet-hell heavy levels, where you have to kill a certain number of enemies to proceed, taking no damage requires a bit of luck in addition to skill.

The main game takes about 5 hours to play through, plus any time you spend chasing after all the challenges. But there’s also a pretty fully-fledged level editor in the game, where you can create your own levels and connect them together in worlds for others to play. If Shotgun Cop Man finds an engaged user base, it’s easy to imagine these user-created levels becoming a huge selling point.