Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Delay. This action game that is heavily inspired by Superhot promises a similar experience to Superhot but in a 2D environment. Whether it can deliver on that promise and implement it well is the question we will try to answer today. Delay is available for 1 Euro and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

2D Superhot. That does certain does sound like an interesting concept. As I’ve enjoyed playing Superhot and I have been very much craving a similar experience. And only for two bucks! So I’ve immediately picked it up and dove straight into it.

Gameplay

But now let’s get straight into the review and as usually we will start by going over the games mechanics. As a game inspired by Superhot, you can guess that Delay will use some sort of manipulation based on your movement. And the basic premise sounds pretty solid. As you move, all the other characters move as well, but they arent at a complete stop if you aren’t moving, they are just slowed down. Yeah, it’s that blatant of a copy of Superhot.
Another mechanic copied from Superhot is the fact that you can throw your weapons towards your enemies to stun them briefly. This of course is a mechanic you need to master otherwise you just wont be capable of beating a lot of the levels. Apart from these two mechanics essentially copied from Superhot, Delay pretty much only has two other mechanics – movement and shooting – and those work pretty much exactly how you would expect them to work.

Now that we know what the mechanics are, let’s talk about how they work and most importantly how they feel.
And I wanna to start with saying: I don’t actually mind that Delay copied things so blatantly from Superhot. The concepts that Superhot presented were new, original and really really awesome. It was just a matter of time until another developer tried using them in their games. What I have a problem with is the way they are implemented in and I’m mostly talking about the “slowtime” mechanic. In Superhot the way time was slowed felt so natural – enemies just did the same exact things as that would do in real time, just really really slowly. Here the mechanic sort of works like this, but only for the movement, though of both of the enemies and the projectiles flying your way. On the other hand it doesn’t work like for when the enemies fire. Instead they have this little counter above their heads that is ticking down to zero and once it hits, they fire.
This mechanic is probably my biggest gripe with the game and on its own manages to cause the game to feel really… weird. Instead of the fluidity of Superhot you get these burts of action around which you must plan. And while it isn’t a completely bad mechanic, it just doesn’t feel right.
The second mechanic I don’t really like is the jumping system. In Delay you can double jump. And weirdly enough, sometimes you can triple jump. But I’ve haven’t been able to find any patter to when you can triple jump and when you can’t. And this inconsistency is just mind boggling.
Apart from these two issues the game is fine, but the problem is that these two things play a pretty major rolle in the gameplay and make it feel much less awesome that it could’ve been.

Graphics

Now let’s move on to the graphics. Delay boasts a pixelart art style focused primarily on simplicity. And to be honest – I do like a lot. I really like pixelart and I do like simple things so this art style and I are a match made in heaven. The only complaint I have about this that it is again heavily and obviously inspired by Superhot. I do think that just a few changes in the art style, like giving a bit more detail to the character and the enemies could have gone a long way to differentiate Delay from Super instead of making a Superhot clone even in the terms of graphics.

Music

Now we have the music. Or don’t. And we actually don’t. Delay doesn’t have any music included as part of this game and this seriously baffles me. There is lots and lots of bands who would love to get free exposure of music they already created. There are tons of royalty free music that can easily be found online. And still the developers of Delay decided to not include any of it and it really hurts the game. Yes, of course you can just play your own favorite music in the background and I suppose that what a lot of people do anyways, but a game completely without music is just a bad business decision in my opinion.

Performance

Performance-wise, Delay worked just find apart from the already mentioned, sometimes double sometimes triple jump. But it didn’t crash and it ran well, but that was pretty expected for a 2D game.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Delay is a painfully average copypaste of a successful game from the last year set in 2D. It has lots of issues like the game feeling somewhat weird at times due to the countdown mechanic. On the other hand, it does entertain for a decent amount of time and it costs only two dollars. And two dollars is nothing these days. So.. I’m actually gonna recommend this game to you guys. If you are looking for a cheap way to spend 20 minutes once a few days, Delay will serve you well. And even if you won’t like it, well, you spent just two dollars.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly of the Steam game page