If time is a river, why are time machines always flying machines, or souped up 80’s sports cars? Why not boats, or rafts, or strangely blinking inner tubes? Time Ace, the latest effort from Train Wreck Studios and Konami, does nothing to answer this question, but instead provides a mildly entertaining shooting romp through time that ultimately falls short in both length and execution.
Time Ace tells the story of the noble and heroic Dr. Clock, who, while working on his time machine (which is a belt, for the record, and sadly not a personal flotation device of any sort) travels into the future to find that the world is gripped in conflict by WWI. Upon returning back to his time, he informs his assistant Scythe, who promptly steals the good doctor’s time machine and travels into the future to take advantage of the war and somehow turn it into personal gain. It’s up to Dr. Clock to pilot various aircraft across various eras in an effort to stop Scythe and, apparently, run into walls at high rates of speed.
To stop Scythe, Dr. Clock pilots eight different aircraft from different time periods. The planes range from WWI era biplanes to modern day fighter jets to futuristic space planes. Along the way, you pick up a Russian scientist named Nadia to help with mission goals and provide horribly voiced encouragement such as “Your mother would be proud of you.” Yes, it is just as creepy as it sounds.
Control is handled via a combination of the d-pad for maneuvering the craft, shoulder buttons for barrel rolls, the X button for afterburners and the Y button for slowing down your plane. Each plane has a primary weapon, mapped to the A button, and rockets mapped to the B button. Special power-ups, in the form of a smart bomb, a shield and an enhanced maneuverability mode, are triggered via the touch screen which also shows your radar.
As this is an on-rails shooter, controlling your craft is a fairly simple task, as long as you’re going in the right direction. During missions, your objectives are pointed out with a large green arrow, until you come across them, at which point the arrow turns red and you know to fill whatever that giant bloody arrow is pointing at with hot led, or lasers, or odd looking green rings. Traveling in the wrong direction is another manner entirely. Often times you leave power-ups or health packs behind as you cut a bloody swath through time, and any effort to backtrack and retrieve these items results in the game giving you a polite nudge in the right direction. This nudge consists of flipping your craft 180 degrees around and usually into a wall, resulting in your destruction. Sometimes the game mixes it up and instead pilots you into another plane, or a random windmill. Variety truly is the spice of life.
Despite these control issues, flying around and blowing up enemies is mildly entertaining. Dr. Clock’s planes are well modeled and explosions are nicely done. The environments have a nice variety to them, even if they seem somewhat incomplete. Enemies abound, giving you ample opportunity to shoot them down for high scores, or to replenish health or afterburner fuel. Oddly enough, you can also forego shooting down these enemies and instead lay on the afterburner until you get to your next objective, blow it up, grab some more afterburner fuel and make tracks to your next objective.
Even if you decide to shoot down every enemy that flies into your crosshairs, Time Ace is a short game. Given that the game is on-rails, any enemies that you don’t shoot down end up passing you by, never to return, nor can you go back and track them down. The game isn’t particularly difficult with plenty of opportunities to grab health packs and extra lives. Even with ignoring most of your enemies, taking enemy fire and smacking into walls, you end most missions with planes to spare. Ratcheting up the difficulty level gives you fewer lives to work with, however given that you can expect to lose one or two planes per mission to gravitational accidents, and with no mid-mission saves, the hard difficulty levels becomes more of an exercise in frustration than skill.
Use of the touch screen appears to have been thrown in as an afterthought. As mentioned before, powerups are triggered via the touch screen, however the missions are so short, and as it’s not obvious when these power-ups are even gained, most times you breeze through a mission without ever using them.
Between missions you can choose to repair your plane which involves a touch screen minigame consisting of welding your damaged hull or soldering a busted circuit board. These minigames are a nice diversion, and, when successful, bolsters the health of your plane in the next mission, but hardly do anything to integrate the DS’s best feature. Time Ace does attempt to use the DS’s Wi-Fi capabilities for 2 – 4 players, but each person needs to have their own cartridge, thereby further lessening the value of the game.
There is fun to be had in Time Ace. The missions can be entertaining and the story, although lacking in any real direction and plausibility, offers some laughs mainly because it lacks direction and plausibility. However the shortness of the campaign, coupled with the lack of any incentive to replay missions makes it hard to call this game a good value, even with the 20 dollar price tag. Ironically enough, what Time Ace needs more of…is time.
