Developer: Rare Publisher: Milton Bradley Release: 09/90 Genre: Action
Growing up borrowing games was an institution. Unless you were rich you did not receive new games regularly so the only way to experience new releases was to either rent or hopefully borrow it from a friend. There was nothing quite like swapping games in school and the anticipation of running home to spend as much time as possible with a potential classic. The only thing worse was realizing you got a turd. Time Lord was one such failure on my part. I knew within five minutes I made a terrible mistake and it would be a long week until I got my copy of Ninja Gaiden 2 back. It haunts me to this day.
In the year 2999 aliens from the planet Drakkon attack Earth. They use time travel technology to attack four specific periods in history to rewrite history and make humanity easier to conquer. You are the Time Lord and have been sent back in time to defeat the aliens before your time machine blows up and takes you with it to protect the space time continuum.
Time Lord has an interesting premise, I will give it that. In each time period your goal is to collect five time orbs to move on to the next era. Since each level takes place in a different era you will gather period specific weaponry. You get pistols and rifles in the Wild West, swords in medieval Europe, a cutlass and throwing knives on the pirate ship, and grenades during World War II. For the game’s finale you can find a shotgun which seems quaint in the year 3000 and homing missiles. The game can be obtuse when it comes to finding weapons but they remain the best part of the game.
Time Lord would be a decent game if its design did not actively hate the player. Rather than a straight side-scroller the game is presented as a belt scroll like a beat em up. This presents issues when attacking enemies or lining up jumps to collect items. These issues are not apparent initially though. While the goal of each level is simple accomplishing it is anything but. The first level lulls you in to a false sense of security as the five orbs are openly available with no caveats and it ends in less than a minute. From there each subsequent level is nonlinear as you seek out the orbs. This is where the problems start.
Each subsequent level presents the orbs as puzzles. The problem is there are no hints or rhyme or reason as to how you obtain them. Some are simple: in stage two collecting all the mushrooms that spawn will make an orb appear. In the Wild West at least one orb is hidden on the side of a building. But then they get esoteric. Right above the previously mentioned mushrooms is an orb out of reach. If you jump kick in the right spot you can bounce high enough to reach it. I did this randomly out of frustration one day and it was not satisfying. In the present day you find an orb that you cannot collect. You must ignore it, advance above and collect enough random falling packages to gain grenades that will somehow make it collectible. Until I replayed the game just now I did not know this.
You could maybe forgive the game’s obtuse nature were it not for the aggressive clock. You start on January 1, 2999 AD and have until the year 3000 before you self-destruct and it is game over. Each day is five or six seconds at most, leaving you with little time to “experiment” and collect all the orbs. It is short but even once you have learned how to earn each orb the laborious boss battles will eat in to your time. They are not particularly tough but they are massive damage sponges and tedious. The massive bandit on the third stage wasted almost three months of my time! The timer does not stop on the last level either. I wager most will not know how to gain your weapons in the final stage and possibly enter the ultimate encounter with their fists and die. Have fun starting over.
Like the majority of Rare’s output Time Lord is brutal in its difficulty. Cheap hits abound and healing items are rare; there is rarely more than one per stage. There are no continues or passwords to save progress, not that the game is long. The hit detection issues make hitting enemies consistently a chore and the boss battles are even worse. For some you can abuse the invincibility frames when attacking to walk away unscathed. But that does not work toward the end. These issues pile on top of the trouble you will have collecting the orbs. I honestly felt like giving up because the game became so ridiculous near the finale. But I grit my teeth and finished the game for closure and, just like Dr. Chaos I wasted my time.
In Closing
Time Lord is an awful game and another in a long line of titles with an interesting premise that botches the execution. There is nothing here that you will not find in other better games. If you need a challenging game that won’t make you punch a wall play Punch-Out or Castlevania, at least there is a method to their madness.
