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    Super Time Force

    Game » consists of 5 releases. Released May 14, 2014

    In this pixel-styled retro shooter from the makers of "Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP", an elite team of totally extreme heroes called the Super T.I.M.E. Force must travel through time and use heavy firepower and the ability to manipulate time to overcome their enemies.

    theosgvault's Super Time Force (Xbox One) review

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    Super Time Force Review Xbox One

    Release Date: 2014 | Players: Single-player| Genre: Shooter | Console: Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox One

    The Intro:

    Science, and by extension, science fiction, has always been obsessed with the idea of time and traveling through it. Some of the greatest sci-fi tales, both in the written word and on the silver screen, have been about time travels, and the hijinks that inevitably ensue because of it. Every sci-fi time travel story has its own internal logic, and there are some that might shock you with their cleverness. Super Time Force, on the other hand, isn’t too concerned with winning the hearts and minds of purists due to its impeccable logic. All it’s concerned with is having fun, and bending time back and forth to make sure you keep having fun. And that makes it a fantastic game.

    The Story:

    Right from the outset, Super Time Force lets you know it doesn’t take itself or the legacy of time travel stories too seriously. It dregs up every staple of the time travel genre and gives it a hilarious twist. The story unfolding during the game starts up when the brilliantly named Dr. Repeatski finally figures out the idea of time travel, and the moment he does this, America is plagued by a swarm of robots from the future. Now a normal scientist who wanted to correct his wrongdoings and save the future of humanity would attempt to go back and forth in time and stop such a thing from happening. However, Dr. Repeatski isn’t too concerned about that. He, and the Super Time Force journey through time to accomplish some of the most needless and outlandish missions you could think of. You will have to go back in time to ‘borrow’ the Holy Grail just so Dr. Repeatski can save a chain of hotels. In another mission, you will journey far into the future and update browsers so that Repeatski can finally catch up on all the cat videos he’s been missing.

    Every superhero team worth its salt needs an arch nemesis, and a nefarious character called Dr. Infinity serves the purpose here. He’s a polite fellow too – at one juncture, he addresses your team nicely and asks you to stay out of the way so he can wipe out the dinosaurs. However, Dr. Repeatski has other ideas, and promptly declines. The absurdity of the situations you are faced with is often hilarious by itself, and it is compounded with some expert writing and a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor. If you ever dreamed of having a time travel machine, not for doing boring stuff like saving the world, but instead for doing whatever catches your whim, Super Time Force will allow you to accomplish it vicariously.

    The Game Play:

    The stages seem like they’re taken out of a dozen other shooters you might’ve seen before, but with one central twist – the power to control time. At any given juncture, you can roll back the events on the screen, and then start playing the level as another character altogether, or even better, as a clone of your original character. Have you ever looked at your teammates and thought “If only there more of me, we could do this right.”? Well, here’s your chance. You can fight alongside a doppelganger of yourself, over and over again, up to a certain limit. Rewinding the action doesn’t reset your level progress – you simply continue from where you left off.

    Having the ability to bend time creates some interesting possibilities for beating a given stage. For example, you might rush in all guns blazing using the firepower of Jean Rambois, and if you come to a point where you simply can’t get through by brute force, you can just switch to your sniper Aimy Mckillin. If you were killed by an enemy grenade as Rambois, you can rewind, come back as Aimy and shoot the enemy in the head before he ever tosses the thing. You also have a couple of other members on your team – Zackasaurus, for one, who is a dinosaur on a skateboard. Because, skateboarding dinosaurs are awesome. You also have the requisite tanky guy in the squad, the super-manly Shieldy Blockerson.

    The Conclusion:

    If you take the time bending aspect aside, Super Time Force is a fairly standard game. But because it has that one specific aspect, everything in the game is elevated to another level. When you can come back as yourself from the past and join yourself from the future to take down an enemy together, it is a bizarre and fun sight. Boss fights require you to use the time manipulation ability more strategically, since they have a lot of hitpoints. In a lot of these boss battles, you will have to make sure you have enough clones of yourself and your team on screen, shooting at the big bosses before the timer expires. Even so, you might find that often boss battles come down to overwhelming the enemy with numbers.

    But that is a small nitpick in what is otherwise a tremendously fun game, and a fantastic callback to the time-travel stories and science fiction entertainment we’ve grown up with. Without worrying too much about the ripple effect that sending multiple versions of yourself back and forth through time might cause, Super Time Force brings the fun in full force, and it’s a blast all the way.

    Author: Brandon Perton From: (The Old School Game Vault) TheOSGVault

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