When it runs at 100%, Mr Shifty is thrilling, challenging and satisfying when played at high speed - as it should be played. Unfortunately, performance issues and a bland personality slightly hold it back from reaching Hotline Miami levels of grandeur.
Although Mr. Shifty is clearly inspired by Hotline Miami, it sets itself apart with the speed of the gameplay and the focus on quick reflex action. The Nintendo Switch version has some bugs as at launch, and the game can be beaten in just a few hours, but the fun and addictive experience makes this a worthy addition to your Switch library.
Mr. Shifty’s influences are easy to identify. In one sentence, it’s “Hotline Miami meets that opening Nightcrawler sequence in X-Men sequel film X2.” It’s high-concept, but Mr. Shifty lives up to the expectations that description might instill.
You play as the eponymous Mr. Shifty, a gun-averse thief with the power of teleportation who spends the entire game storming a tower in the style of movies like The Raid or Dredd. There’s a plot, but the script all but acknowledges that it doesn’t matter–you’re here to teleport a lot and beat up hundreds of bad guys. Mr. Shifty only has three abilities: He can teleport a short distance, he can punch hard, and he can pick up melee weapons which can then be used to strike an enemy directly or thrown from afar.
In a typical encounter, you might aggressively warp into a room, punch an enemy twice, and then immediately jump out. The foes in the room will give chase, and you’ll stand by the doorway and take out another one by slamming them into the door as they exit, then warp to safety. From there, you can warp back into the room they just left and take out the last to leave, then run outside and warp between the stragglers, taking them down as fast as possible.
This is one of the game’s simpler scenarios–at any given point, there’s a chance you also need to deal with proximity mines, rocket-launching enemies, turrets, moving laser grids, and zones that hinder shifting. The true beauty of Mr. Shifty is that you can only plan so far ahead, especially in later levels. You can have a perfect plan for how to deal with the first 10 foes in an area, but one of them might use a surprising new tactic or more enemies might flood in, and you suddenly need to adjust your strategy. As you warp around–being careful not to use five warps in quick succession and deplete your shift meter–carnage is likely to unfurl around you, and it’s up to you to corral your enemies while also being aware of any nearby hazards. Mr. Shifty feels varied, even as you’re performing the same actions repeatedly.
Enemies are dumb enough to kill their fellow soldiers if they think they have a shot at you, a fact that becomes near-vital once they begin carrying rocket launchers. You can pick up grenades or timed mines, teleport into a room, drop one, and teleport back out. Tricking an enemy into taking out their support or provoking a group of foes before blowing them up with a well-placed mine feels fantastic, and surveying the ensuing carnage makes you feel amazing for having survived it. The key is confidence and fast action, and when you’re taking out 20-plus bad guys in quick succession, it’s easy to walk away feeling smug.
Mr. Shifty is a hectic, challenging game, but it’s rarely frustrating or unfair–the checkpointing is generous, meaning you rarely lose more than a minute of progress at a time. However, a few puzzles and scenarios don’t align with game’s typical scenarios: a small handful of rooms across Mr. Shifty’s 18 levels offer up light puzzles, and in a few instances, the solution requires prompting the somewhat flighty AI into performing very specific actions. These sequences are brief and too uncommon to become a huge issue, though. Realistically, all this means is that the game may hold you up for a few minutes until you figure out a solution.
What’s more likely to turn players away from Mr. Shifty is its presentation–to be blunt, this is not a great-looking game. The developers have opted for a cel-shaded look, but everything is rendered very simplistically. The game also suffers from performance issues whenever the screen is full of enemies and effects, which happens a lot toward the end. Mr. Shifty can stutter heavily on both Switch and PC, visibly struggling to handle all the moving parts. However, this isn’t a deal breaker, and one of these brief stutters can actually grant you an extra half second to plot your way out of a sticky situation.
Mr. Shifty isn’t a huge game in terms of length, but the three- to four-hour campaign is ample. It’s like a shot of adrenalin, offering an exciting, intense experience, and it’s easy to forgive the game’s performance flaws when it so consistently makes you feel like a badass.
Mr. Shifty takes the action-packed gameplay of a title like Hotline Miami, and adds the mechanics to take it to the next level, in my opinion. Mr. Shifty is several hours of fun, touching on 80's movie tropes, and really packs it in with an arcade-y gameplay that can't be rivaled by many in the same genre. Story is where the game really lacks, as it has nothing but a cliche' husk, but gameplay alone stands to make this a title worth your time.
Despite the framerate issues, Mr. Shifty is a good time and well worth the price of admission. One of the better games on the Nintendo Switch. Maybe a patch can rectify my main concern with the game.
Addictive like old school arcades, its simple but fun gameplay will keep players retrying every time they die until they complete each mission. Graphics and music do their job and the result is an overall recommendable title without ambitions.
Mr Shifty makes an incredibly strong first impression with its unique teleporting twist on top-down brawling action. But it’s a game that overstays its welcome, with a dry well of ideas that struggle to evolve past their basic premise.
We want it to be clear that the version we played for this review was the full Switch eShop release. We've been told that the game runs much smoother on PC in the launch period, so you might want to make that your platform of choice if you want to check this one out – and honestly, you should. There's nothing groundbreaking to be found here, but it's a decent game with interesting ideas that unfortunately aren't fully fleshed out. We just can't fully recommend the Switch version in its initial form, and it's disappointing that this one falls under the category of games released in a sub-par state that leave owners hoping that promised updates will save the day.
This game basically will test your reflex and how you manage to use your surrounding accordingly. The game offer a good concept of action and puzzle games, it will provide you with a rush of adrenaline as well as frustration, it have simple control and mechanic which is amazing, it also have a decent story line and manage to present this quite nicely. the game however is a bit short, and does not give a lot incentive to replay it once you finish the game. it could also added new way to solve some of the mission objective so could offer a more motivation to replay the game differently and does not seem repetitive.
Mr. Shifty reminded me Hotline Miami so much but this game just doesn’t present enough new ideas to sustain itself. I think it’s worth a playthrough, but I don’t believe we’ll be talking about Mr. Shifty for years to come. Just as quickly as Shifty himself enters and leaves a room, so too does this game enter and exit your mind.
"I'm here, now I'm not" Basically that's the whole game. Mr. Shifty is a wannabe Hotline Miami with a unique mechanic: Teleporting Nightcrawler style. Have to say that is really an interesting mechanic but that grows old after the first hours. There is some clever stage design that challenge the player to think fast. Sometimes is rewarding to be able to complete a stage after many deaths. There is nothing memorable about this game. Also, the frame rate, it drops dramatically when so many things happen on the screen, it's not properly optimized, I don't know how it is in other versions. Mr. Shifty is an ok game, but don't expect anything special here.
This game is garbage. Start to finish it's terrible. The game throws tons of enemies at you and demands that you kill them all to move on. The checkpoint system is a complete joke. You have to redo entire rooms WHEN you die, and you will die a lot because of how cheap this game is. The final level is even worse than the rest of the game because instead of going through a door and getting a checkpoint, the door dissolves and you are forced to do an entire two room area over and over again as the entire building shifts around you. Whichever one of the developers thought it would be awesome to put so few weapons in the game and doesn't allow the player to use the guns strewn about everywhere, stop making games. Now. Just stop. I want my $15 back for this game. It's terrible. You may be hurting for games to play on the Switch, but skip this game, unless you enjoy just wasting money, even then I would just take the money outside and throw it into the wind instead of spending it on this. In the end, you'll have just as much value for the money spent. Waste of money; waste of time. Terrible, terrible game.
SummaryShift through bullets, and master lightning-fast takedowns in an all new kind of action game from tinyBuild and Team Shifty. Mr. Shifty follows a teleportation-fueled heist to break into the world's most secure facility.