Super Time Force caught my and the media’s attention when it was announced about years ago around after its initial debut as a project for an indie game jam. Thankfully after a long time, the game is finally out, after being heavily re-worked. And the wait was worth it.

The game’s plot for as brief as it can be, is silly. After Dr. Repeatski finally discovers how to make Time Travel possible, he is visited by his future self, and showboating the time travel he created and is using to alter time lines to “fix things so they aren’t bad” and making fun of him a bit. This certainly won’t cause problems. Anyway, the now Colonel Repeatski accomplish these time-altering adventures with the help of his team of government sponsored military fighting force. You start off with three members but can gain more as you get through the various missions.

The gameplay involves you running around your chosen level, but that’s only after the training and first level have been taken care of. The game plays a bit like Contra or Metal Slug, with you jumping and shooting enemies in a platforming shooter fashion. Despite how well you perform in a level, you will eventually be forced to take a ‘Time-Out’ to retry with renewed attack strength and better efficiency. There is a timer in the level and there will be times were your normal firepower isn’t enough. So by using Time Out, you can rewind back time and once you begin again, your past character will repeat their previous actions which has real-world has effects on your present situation. After they get to the point where you used Time Out, you can ‘Team-Up’ to inherit their charge shot powers. If you manage to prevent the previous characters from dying, then you can Team-Up with them as well. Teaming-Up lets you take as many extra hits as Team members you’ve joined up with. And you will need it, since you are likely to die a lot. Each use of Time-Out acts as your lives in this way, and the game even makes a reference to Contra by giving you 30 of them for each section of a level, unless you can pick up more time-shards. There are also various collectables to find as well, and you can find time extensions during a post-rewind. There are even ways to slow time down briefly. Each character also has their own strengths and weaknesses, although some of them are clear improvements over the defaults.

The levels are fun and challenging and the jokes will provide a chuckle or two. The game really is set-up on the premise of being a Contra or Metal Slug game for players that aren’t all that great at them, since the rewind features, saving, and checkpoint systems all make for a better game-flow and learning experience.

The music is pretty decent, and the visuals are low-res, but they are bright and are animated very well. If there were any shortcomings, it would be that there could have been more levels, and some extra unlockable character outside of the ones you pick up in the campaign. The game is also single player only, which is a bummer since the games it’s inspired from were multi-player capable. I guess with the rewind function made that kind of hard to do. I would have had player 1 be the sole user of Time-Out. Or possibly make an old school ‘Out-of-Time’ mode. But this game is a solid experience for retro platforming shooter fans. Super Time Force is worthy of the $15 price tag.

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