PAX: ‘Super T.I.M.E Force’ Preview – We’re Dying In Anticipation

Capybara’s Super T.I.M.E Force rocked my world. I had seen the trailer and was intrigued but since I’m not a huge shooter or a Contra fan, I wasn’t particularly excited about the game. Man, how that has changed. Super T.I.M.E Force, even in this early stage, is one of the best indie games that I have played so far this year.

At its core, Super T.I.M.E Force is a platform shooter similar to Metal Slug or Contra. At the start of a level, you select a character and are immediately dropped into the action.  For the PAX Demo, you started with 3 characters: a soldier wielding a gatling gun, a sniper with a laser that can shoot through walls and a melee dude with a riot shield. After selecting your character, you’re thrown right into the action but the beauty of Super T.I.M.E Force is that you are not penalized for dying.

In fact dying is fun because it means that the game will rewind to the start and allow you to select another character. Your previous character’s ghost recording will fight alongside you and you can even save previous versions of yourself and then go back and add on to that recording. It’s hard to explain but exceptionally fun. Hopefully the video below that I captured off screen will help people understand the flow of the game.

The levels are short and the objective is to simply get one character to the finish alive. Each death reduces your life count and the developers told me that it is possible to beat a level with just one life – it’s just not as much fun.

The second level of the demo introduced a pixilated Rambo character with a Bazooka that you could select after you saved him. The demo culminated in a very difficult boss battle, leaving me to immediately ask Capy what their plans were regarding multiplayer, the XBLA release and the number of character classes. Capy answered that they have some ideas around multiplayer, but that this game has always been a fun side-project around the office and that they would like to keep it that way for a while and have no dedicated team or timeframe for getting the title out on XBLA. My response is the same as the conclusion of their first teaser trailer, “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

More information on on Super T.I.M.E Force can be found over on the game’s official website.