Addicts. I know a few, and drugs have ruined their life. It did not give them super powers, but it did give them 15 months in jail (I refuse to use the Australian spelling), and the disrespect of family.

Anyway, the plot here is basically that you, the addict, turn to clinical trials and end up with mind control powers. Things turn bad, and you are set for extermination. So you exterminate the science and military guys instead. It's a story of power, addiction, and betrayal. Kinda. To be honest the 'plot' here is very light and serves to only push the missions along.

I will give it some credit. It did not use the 10% of your brain myth.

The core mechanic of the game is that you can temporally possess people. Taking control of their body and sending them to shoot their allies, re: your enemies, leaving your soft flesh untouched.

And seeing as you only have 1HP, much like in real life, you'll want to be doing this.

As an enemy troop, you can walk around until the players mental meter drops to zero, at which point they regain control. So turn on the others, do a little damage, make a little blood, and get shot. Or sacrifice the enemy with a kill command for their shiny, shiny, guns.

Just make sure that the you you does not get shot. You are rather vulnerable when possessing others. Also much like in real life.

Unfortunately the game does not live to the full potential it could have with this. On the first mission you are shown other abilities you have.

The first one is Explode! Which rather than killing the possessed guy, blows them up for ludicrous gibs. Killing others in an Area of Effect command. I think I used this twice. It rarely shows as an option.

The one I did like was 'Chain Kill'. Once I figured out how it works as it was not clear. But essentially by manually creating a kill combo, you can activate a special ability that will link you n-Amount of baddies and turn them into a bloody mess. The greater your combo, the greater the chain combo. It does have a nice reward system to it... Unfortunately, you have a limited time to activate it when it becomes available, and in most cases I was out of the mental metre and not able to do so.

It feels as if the possession and other abilities could of given a tiny amount of puzzle element to the game. Figuring out who to take out and take out to progress and infiltrate the games various zones.

Instead there's lots of pew-pew and not much else.

The game also has a bad habit of starting or spawning you in an area crawling with baddies. You've got less than a second to move once the levels starts or you are dead.

And it does this a lot.

On return run levels if you skipped the guards by the stairs or exits, expect to have an ever worse time. You need to quickly hide and dodge their bullets, or punch one out and take their weapon before the others arrive.

There were a few levels where it took a few dozen attempts as I transitioned between zones with a single bullet in a pistol, no armour, and armoured baddies all around.

Now it is possible to beat these, though RNG on the weapons and awareness of the enemy means you keep restarting the zone until you make it. And keep restarting. And keep restarting. And, oh, you made it to the stairs? Well too bad, we did not fade to black quick enough causing you to be shot, so you can restart again...

Staticshort is one of those 'indie' indie games that does a decent job but just feels a little lacking. A time bit more polish. A tiny bit more of QA and testing of level conditions. And the change to how playable the game is would of been huge.

As a bundled title though, I got 3 hours of entertainment out of it. And that was enough to give me something to do this afternoon.

Game Acquisition: On Sale (Bundle Stars - Impact 1)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 27 February 2020
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows Vista/7/8/10
Processor: 1.7 Ghz or higher
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: 512MB or higher
Sound Card: OpenAL compatible sound card