Sometimes a game has a mechanic so brilliant and works so naturally that I can’t help but wonder where it’s been all my life. Super Time Force revolves around such a mechanic: Single player Co-Op.

Every time you die, you start over. The hook is that your last attempts do as well, fighting alongside you before they repeat their grisly demise. If you die enough, you can amass an army of failures and maybe, just maybe, have a completely successful run.

This death-centric idea works especially well in combination with the Contra-like brutality of its “one hit and you die” style of play. As is, this would have been enough to be a very interesting run and gun game. But developer CAPY took things a step further.

“Your failures become your allies each time you die.”

If you manage to remove your past self’s cause of death in time, you can actually save the ghost player. You can then walk up to them and create a checkpoint. The catch is that it will disappear after one use. This makes saving your ghost players essential if you want to avoid starting back at the beginning of the level. And since a single life can only stay in the time stream for 30 seconds, checkpoints do more than just avoid loss of progress. Of course, you can do many things to get time bonuses and even multipliers to keep things interesting.

Rather than swap guns out with powerups, Super Time Force let’s you access a quick character select screen each time you die. Each character has a drastically different weapon from spreadshots and lasers to bullet-reflecting shields and melee attacks. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to swap characters just so that your army of doomed ghosts can be extra versatile. This is also encouraged because the checkpoints you create from saving your ghosts will cause you to play as whichever character died at that spot in the stage.

The bulk of my experience with Super Time Force was spent on a mission to prevent the dinosaurs from becoming extinct. The primary motivation? Because it would be totally rad. And you know what? It really was. Particularly when I rescued Zackasaurus, a skateboarding dinosaur with sunglasses (in other words, a personified version of the 90′s) who then became playable.

With the exception of the occasional flat joke, Super Time Force nails humor as much as gameplay. It has a Saturday morning cartoon vibe permeating throughout it that’s hard not to love. Super Time Force successfully blends a wonderful new idea with the tried and true action of timeless classics. It has quickly become one of my most anticipated downloadable titles of 2013.

This preview is based on the showfloor demo of Super Time Force for Xbox Live Arcade at PAX 2012. The full game will release in 2013.

Tags: 2D action game, hands-on impressions, PAX 2012, preview, run and gun, Super Time Force, xbla, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2012 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Features, Indie Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.