Super Time Force

I played the game Braid just before the Back-Blog started up, and I was a huge fan of it not because of its controversial storyline, but simply because its central gimmick, requiring the player to rewind time repeatedly to solve puzzles felt so fresh and exciting. Sure, the time-rewind had been done before in the Prince of Persia series, but that was just a bit of a modified "extra life", allowing the player to back up and retry failed platforming stunts. Braid on the other hand forced the player to rewind and think critically about their actions, and how the environment would change as you guide your character back and forth through time, rather than just using it to correct mistakes. Super Time Force, while not as elegantly simple as Braid, uses that rewind gimmick in yet another interesting way, forcing you to complete each one of its levels and boss fights in under "sixty seconds". Even you played this bullet-hell game perfectly this is seemingly impossible; there's just too much to do to stay under the sixty second mark. So Super Time Force allows you to rewind time, a total of thirty times per level, and each time you rewind time you're allowed to play as a different character with different special abilities while the last guy you played as still does the same thing you did before. The most obvious example of the rewind ability at work would be a breakable door in the middle of the level that must be passed through. For one character it may take ten second to shoot down. A long time! After that time is up though, you can rewind those ten seconds, gaining them back, and then start blasting away again- your original guy is still there firing ten second's worth of bullets, and now you're working double-time and the door will come down in five seconds. Another rewind would have the wall down in a mere 3.3 seconds, but is it worth it to use one of the thirty rewinds to gain another two seconds? The rewind mechanic also lets you explore the levels and try to find all of the collectibles- if you see something that might take some time to grab, you can really use whatever time is remaining to get it, then rewind all the way back to when you started again. That's pretty neat! Still though, Super Time Force never ended up getting too difficult with its challenges, which is a shame. Most boss fights, while fun, can really be brute forced- just throw as many guys firing at the boss as possible and they'll go down quickly. There's a learning curve here where I had to go from clueless to good at the game, but I never really needed to take a next step and it felt like the game never built off of these interesting gameplay tactics it had taught me. Still though, while there are tons of lazy 16-bit retro shooters out these days, Super Time Force definitely surprised me with a bit of depth.