Hot Shot Burn

Genre: Top-Down Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

Hot Shot Burn is a Top-Down Arcade / Party Game that has players shooting each other up in an arena, trying to be the last one standing. This game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation here is decent but nothing spectacular. The characters are cartoony and use a hand-drawn art style, the levels have some decent detail to them without being especially interesting, there are decent animations for various effects, but nothing ever reaches the point of being impressive or memorable. These visuals are paired with energetic music and a cheesy announcer that give the game a fun, lighthearted tone, but don’t do much more than that.

As for the gameplay… I’m kinda’ conflicted here. On the one hand, this game does a lot of things right – there’s a decent array of diverse characters, all fairly well balanced with a unique weapon and special ability, but without much more in the way of gameplay elements to clutter up the game’s elegant simplicity. When this game is working, it makes for an excellent and fast-paced strategic shooting match.

The problems, however, are numerous. Firstly, your movement and aiming are controlled using the same analog stick, and this is a big pet peeve of mine for games of this type, where it would be a lot more fun if this were a 2-stick shooter. Secondly, matches can be extremely fast, and the time between them can drag with no way to speed on to the next match, meaning that you can easily spend more time in results screens than actually playing… even when everyone wants to get back to the gameplay. Thirdly, character movement is fairly slow and many characters have shots that don’t travel very far at all, and while I get that this is probably a very intentional part of the design, it also makes for a slower, clumsier game than many others in the genre. Fourth, despite this game having a clear focus on multiplayer, the online lobbies are currently empty, so don’t expect to find much competition there.

That’s… a lot of flaws in an otherwise simple, solid multiplayer Party Game, and that’s a shame, because I feel like all Hot Shot Burn would take is some minor tweaking and a few player-controlled options to turn it from something mediocre into something great. But, well… that tweaking hasn’t been done, and because of this it’s hard to recommend this game, especially with so many other great Party Games on the Nintendo Switch. Maybe go with one of those instead.

tl;dr – Hot Shot Burn is a Top-Down Arcade-style Party Game where players try to shoot each other in an arena. There’s a good mix of fairly balanced characters here, but the game is dragged down by a laundry list of flaws ranging from unskippable between-match menus slowing things down, a lack of second-stick aiming, and empty online lobbies. If it weren’t for the flaws, this would be a great simple multiplayer Party Game, but as it is, it’s hard to recommend this game over the many other better options on the Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C

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