Time Commando

The Good
Well, there really isn't a lot I can write here save for some nice features like:

-Weapons, and lots of them! Nothing says "I'm gonna kick your ass" like the right weapon, and on each level you'll find plenty of weapons to add to your arsenal (which you never get to really keep for later on). Everything from Katanas to rifles to spells to that weird yo-yo thing from the future is available for the time honored tradition of moping the floors with your enemies.

-Great graphics. Time Commando puts togheter pre-rendered backgrounds, polygonal models and even fmv to display a really amazing scenery. It all looks extremelly cool.

Well, that's it, tough to be fair I had some fun on levels like the WWI one.

The Bad
Time Commando has millions of design flaws, but they can be traced to one source alone, an that is the fact that while the game may label itself as a revolutionary adventure, with this and that and whatever, it really is nothing but a scrolling beat 'em up with delusions of grandeur.

The developers tought that if adventure games are fun and action games are fun, a game that combines them both would be double as fun! It makes sense, doesn't it? Unfortunately they decided to go the lazy route and working with pre-existing control schemes & engines cooked up a lame version of a classic 2D beat 'em up in the grand tradition of such classics as Final Fight, Double Dragon, etc... (you know, insert generic storyline here, insert super-steroid ladden hero, insert millions of baddies, etc.) and on top of that they added a lot of graphic fanfare, an adventure game control scheme, and a whooole lot of pretentious design choices. Result: Time Commando! A beat 'em up that thinks its a trascendental & groundbreaking adventure game that was really really serious shit...Aha, yup, riiiiight. In short, you have a game that instead of going for either mindless action or involving adventure takes the middle road and screws itself up.

As an "adventure" Time Commando is stupidly simple and straightforward, has pretty much nothing to interact with (unless you count hitting someone in the face as "interacting"), and has a completely stupid storyline that gives you more glitter and whiz-bang imagery than real content.

On the other hand as a beat 'em up, the action is slow and un-exciting, the characters have a remarkable lack of charisma (you lack any quirky one-liners, and the big baddie is....... a cyber-fish....), you can't trash anything in the background, the control scheme gets in your way since it tries to be 3D but has to exist in a 2D world, there isn't a sequence in a bar/strip club, and there is absolutely NO multiplayer!!!!!!!!!!! I mean, Double Dragon was DOUBLE for a reason!!! What the hell is the point of playing these games by yourself other than killing time????

Anyway, if you ask me they should have ditched all the fake pretenses and just go all out with a dumb, but FUN beat 'em up. As it is now it's just has enough of everything to amount to Nothing.

The Bottom Line
As stated in the box cover, Time Commando tries to capture the "adrenaline of a fighting game & the total immersion of an adventure game" however Adeline shot themselves in the feet and ended up with a game that has "the brain-dead simplicity of a beat 'em up & the boring pace of an adventure game" Nice going guys... Next time try sticking with one genre, and if you really feel like mixing it up then start from the ground up with a brand new design. If you just drop things in a blender expecting them to magically spurt out a great game you end up with undefined crap like this.