Time Commando

The Good
For a 7 year old game, it was better than I expected.I found myself getting caught up in the historic theme. Good, not great graphics. Entertaining and more challenging than I thought it might be. Secrets are there to be found. You have to be resourceful with what weapons you use. And get the controls down before you advance too much.

The Bad
Some monotony with game play. Some viewpoints are hidden. You cannot go back to important areas/items if you go past them. Limited saves.

The Bottom Line
It can be gotten at a cheap price, and worth your time.

The Good
One thing always drive me frenzy crazy (in a very positive way) when it comes to games. That thing is called The Animation. Or we could easily make it plural. Anyway, this game is quite okay in animations, but it reveals the other thing much much more. The Action and lust for continuing until the game was finished the very same day. If you better think, you'll be revealed by your own mind that when you play some not so much quality game, that you at least expect to joy over its animations. When you play some real-time strategy game, you can hardly wait to see the incoming afterlevel animation, when you play the role-playing game, you are driven towards the endgame animation, or some other animation that could occur while on some locations. And even the game can be deadly addictive, the animations are the one to relieve your soul, give you a small break, and tell you some story or two. But, when you play some first-person action shooter, or something, where the animations look as you play 'em, that can be tolerated, 'cuz your adrenaline is so high, that animations would only do a backward step. This game is on such course.

This game carries a proper name to its gameplay. You start as a commando, that will soon experience some time loops, in some stone age era armed only with your combat skills. You can most of all pick your opponent's weapons, and use it on other foes, but beware, each foe is resistant or not to different weapons. As you progress through well created and imagined levels, you get to new time periods, like "When in Rome...", battling roman legions, then come to the far east battling ninjas and samurai warriors. And last, but not the least... hehe, time period without the firepower is a new age, battling knights and thugs, and finally death itself. Then, the World War I time comes, where you get to shoot from some old rusty long guns, and in a newer ages machine guns and bazookas. Finally, you'll encounter future time, and computer virtual battlefield that will outcome freeing your beloved, or you'll die trying.

Finally, this is the game that gives you the opportunity and will to play & finish it more then once. It just asks you for that, and of course, you cannot say no. You need to pick old colt and try the wild wild west in real. The characters and almost everything is very much alike to Alone in the Dark trilogy, and, as a matter of fact, you move your character in exact same way, using keyboard for moving and fighting. Try this and become a Time Commando under your Wondows.

The Bad
When this game came out, I thought it's a piece of crap, loaded with nonsence. I soon realized my judgement wasn't proper, especially since I haven't seen that game by the time of judging. I guess that's my thing down. This game has none.

The Bottom Line
Awesome, dude. You gotta try it. For what it presents, you don't have to expect more then it gives you, so you won't have to be dissapointed. Nice action rpg game with all neccessary styles to win your gameplay, at least once.

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.

The Good
Well, this game was very overhyped, at least in Israel. It's fun to play at first and has nice graphics (but nothing more).

The Bad
The sound effects are very distrubing and the gameplay gets simply tiresome after a while. The game is also short and simply not very interesting.

The Bottom Line
You might want to play this "just in case", but I simply don't like it much.