Burp haha science lol everyone is slowly dying, where’s my chicken tender dip? I need my chicken tender dip. For science. Burp. Haha lol.

You know that one? That’s my favorite show. Classic television programming. Always big on the ol’ Reddit. Sometimes you just gotta quote the show and Reddit will like that. Thank you for the gold, kind stranger. But did you know there’s a video game for it now too?

That’s right. Mr. Swifty. You know, from the show? Get swifty. Haha. Lol!

A top-down, fast-paced beat-em-up for the Nintendo Switch and PC, Mr. Swifty puts you in the shoes of the one and only Mr. Swifty. From the cartoon. And you need to infiltrate a high-security tower thing to get your dip back. You know the blue guy from X-Men? Not the one with the tits, the other dude. The one that teleports? Mr. Swifty is kinda like if that guy was in Hotline Miami, and also if there were no drugs involved.

Where Hotline Miami was an intense game with a powerful feeling of life and death, Mr. Swifty kinda just swaps that out for super powers. That intense adrenaline rush, the sensation of knowing that in the brief few seconds after you storm through that door, someone will be dying? The chaos of all your planning and strategy crumbling in the heat of the moment? All of that is gone, and instead we got the ability to instantly vaporize and materialize somewhere else.

Kinda like my dad, one minute he’s going out for cigarettes and the next he shows up at my graduation asking if he could borrow five bucks for dry-cleaning. But he wasn’t even wearing a shirt, so I don’t know what he needed to dry-clean.

Mr. Swifty is an incredibly satisfying brawler, and uses its gimmick in quite a few interesting ways. Unlike Hotline Miami, you’re forced to stick to melee combat. Punching, using blunt objects to knock people around, throwing coffee cups and shit in their face, just whatever you find lying around. You can chuck a wad of money at someone to knock them out, but you can’t pick their gun up off the floor to use. Not even to throw the gun at someone, you can’t even touch the guns.

The weapons you do find lying around are usually pretty similar in how they work, because again, they’re almost all either blunt objects or projectiles. It’s not like there’s combos or anything, you just mash the button to kill people. There’s quite a bit of enemy variety though, and the game will give you options on how you’d like to tackle them. You can barge in, punching and teleporting your way through everything. Or you can always opt for the silent, stealthy approach.

Teleporting through walls and stringing together kills by warping between enemies is a lot of fun, and the action rarely stagnates. It’s an incredibly empowering experience, far from the endorphin-fueled lesson in mortality that Hotline Miami was. You get no sense of the fragility of human life, just the overwhelming sensation of how fucking badass it is to teleport through a guy and kick him through a fucking window. Very different games.

Towards the end of the game, when almost every enemy has, like, an automatic grenade shotgun? Maybe it’s closer to Hotline Miami, but only in the sense that you’re going to die a lot. It gets very tense, but I would never put it on the same level as Hotline Miami. In fact, I wouldn’t even want to put them in a sentence together.

Unless the sentence was “Mr. Swifty is a poor attempt to recreate Hotline Miami and completely misses in its attempt to even capture the true essence of the original game, but you can set off all the explosives in a room just as you teleport through a wall, leaving all of the enemies trapped inside to meet their fiery demise, so the game is still pretty alright”.

Standing on its own merits, Mr. Swifty definitely scores much higher than when compared to Hotline Miami. Going in expecting the same thing would definitely disappoint a few people.

If you enjoyed Hotline Miami, I think it’s only natural that you would also enjoy Mr. Swifty. They loosely use similar game mechanics, even if the feel and aesthetic are completely off. The art style is pretty attractive, though there is a tiny bit of slowdown I noticed when things get a little too hectic on screen.

The core concept is pretty sound though. It could even apply to other games. Just think about it. Take a game that’s really good, and then add a superpower. Hotline Miami with teleportation might seem cool, but what if you had shapeshifting powers in Pokemon? You could become the Pokemon and fight alongside your Pokemon. And like, probably yiff them too.

Or what if Cooking Mama could spontaneously ignite her body? She wouldn’t even need to cook shit anymore, she would just have to hold shit and it’d get cooked. The name Cooking Mama would still make sense in a way.

Really, superpowers need to be the next gaming trend. Fuck the mech, fuck the bow and arrow, fuck the open-world and the rogue-like. Superpowers. That’s what we need.