Time Commando (1996)

Time Commando (1996), created by Frédérick Raynal, developed and published by Adeline Software International

After the CD-ROM had become a general peripheral on computers in the 90s, the game developers found themselves in a situation where they had more space at their disposal than they had ever had before. A whopping 650 megabytes of storage space was at their disposal, asking to be filled with entertainment. Time Commando by Adeline Software gave one answer to how that space was used: 3D rendered animated sequences during gameplay. Think of it as CGI animation infused with real-time gameplay, not cut scenes in a way most FMV games did back then.

The story begins, when a saboteur strikes a military compound where an advanced warfare simulator resides. The virus the saboteur infuses into the simulator creates a vortex that threatens to devour the entire world if not stopped and you, a security specialist, have to step in the vortex, which takes you through several time periods, to take care of the problem.

Time Commando is a combat game, infused with some simple puzzle elements. the battles are fought with bare hands and with time period-appropriate weapons you have to collect each time you get through two levels of each period. The first zone is the prehistoric era, where you fight with clubs and stones, the next is the Roman Empire with swords and spears, Japanese middle age, Middle Age, the era of Spanish Conquistadors, Wild West, Modern Wars and finally the Future, where you have to take on the virus itself.

The game begins as a close combat game, where you only have fists and clubs, after which you graduate to swords and then finally firearms. As you'd suspect of a 90s action game, the controls really are the biggest crux in the way of enjoying the game. In almost every game with a similar 2.5D approach, where you control a 3D character in a 2D world, the controls feel a bit off. Hell, even in most 90s full 3D games, the controls feel off. Here, the controls do make hitting the enemy a bit hard at times, especially if you use firearms. Then there's the little problem of getting lost in the environment at times, or the enemies fighting you outside the boundaries of the screen.

The way the game environments work like this: after you've beaten an enemy or two, you can move forward, usually towards one edge of the screen, which then launches an animation of the screen moving, during which you can still control the character. Usually, this is straightforward, but at times, the world can have unseen traps, which launch at you. This obviously causes unfair energy drainage. While this system does make the game look better in contrast to if it had real-time 3D environments, that doesn't really translate well to gameplay.

You can heal the character during the game by collecting health ups and extra health containers. There are also extra lives on the levels, of which you can have a maximum of three at a time. Annoyingly enough, each death also removes one energy slot, so you have to recollect the additional slots each time you kick the bucket. Other collectables are, obviously, the ammo for the firearms later on in the game and computer chips you need to reset the game time counter.

Indeed, the game has a time limit, you have to keep in check. So not only are you bogged down by rather clumsy control mechanics and the way the world is built but a time counter as well. You can reset the timer during the levels if you find the portal, but otherwise, you do that by the end of each level, if you have enough chips. If you don't have enough chips, then you will have less time to complete the next level. This isn't really a huge problem, but it does, overall, feel a rather unnecessary extra element, which doesn't seem to serve any genuine purpose, not on the easiest levels at least, as there are plenty of chips around.

The puzzle elements are rather simplistic. At times, you meet a roadblock and need to figure a way past it. At times, it is something in the environment you need to operate in order to open a doorway, at times there is a need to use some specific weapon, like an explosive to clear the path. So nothing too taxing especially when the limited resources at your disposal are taken into account.

If you were expecting some kind of a larger narrative, there really isn't one. There is no dialogue or story cutscenes. At times, you see some little CGI snippet of a time jump happening, but that's pretty much it. Time Commando is, by all counts, an action game, where the story is just an excuse to throw you in a fight against all kinds of enemies, from cavemen to future soldiers and that's it.

Time Commando could have been a decent game in its day, but it really hasn't aged very well to be considered a good game now. Even if the controls were fixed to be closer to modern aesthetics, it still suffers from the way the levels have been constructed. Mind you, the idea to use pre-rendered animation instead of poor quality real-time graphics as the world art is a nice one, offering a way to make the game look better, but it doesn't really turn into a fluent gameplay experience.

As a game, this is a relic from the past. It might be worth checking out if you like fighting games, but as it stands on its own, I'd give it a miss. If you are, however, a fan of Alone in the Dark creator, Frédérick Raynal, then I guess you have an extra incentive of trying it out.