Super Time Force Review

The Xbox community was abuzz earlier this year when the team at Capy Games announced that they'd be bringing Super Time Force to the public. Not only bringing it digitally to the Xbox 360, but to the Xbox One as well, doing so through the ID@Xbox indy-publisher program. Here they've lived up to their hype, bringing a game that's every bit as entertaining as the trailers and gameplay segments released earlier this year led us to believe it would be.

The game Super Time Force is made of pixels. Pixels arranged in a way that will make you forget about the world of 1080p/60fps. Instead of pushing the envelope with realism, the crew at Capy have relaxed back into a visual environment in which they're able to deliver an ideal aesthetic.

You get the impression in Super Time Force that the entire screen has been accounted for. This game is a glorious whirlwind of pixels jacked up in a way that makes us want to never stop playing.

Gameplay seems – at first – to take on the form of a totally traditional side-scrolling shooter. But then you die.

When you die in Super Time Force, you're transported back in time. When you're transported back in time, you choose any one of your (several) characters to launch inside a moment your current hero has already existed in. Once you launch this new character, he or she and whatever other characters you've already played this timeline with fight together.

In every demo you'll see a skull, a rewind symbol, and a number – this number represents the number of time rewinds you're able to execute. If you've got 34 when you first die, and you continue dying 30 times in a row, your 31st rewind (for example) will have you joining 30 other "ghost" versions of yourself, all fighting at once, all re-living the exact sequence of actions you commanded them to take when they were first summoned.

Dying becomes a part of your strategy. You might need Shieldy Blockerson to help you out when your blasting away with one of your gun-heavy characters. Take a death and re-join the pack!

Above is the first 15-minutes of the game as we experienced it. This game begins with an unexpectedly large amount of storyline – for what we expected the game to be – quickly letting us in on the secret: just because Super Time Force is an "indy" game, it doesn't have to skimp on the details.

There are a lot of details in Super Time Force. As the developers of this game have suggested more than once, you can potentially rail throughout the game without picking up on a lot of the secrets and power-ups available to you your first time around.

You'll be playing Super Time Force more than once. Unless you have some preternatural understanding of how to fire every projectile in the right direction at every perfect moment, you're going to die a lot. That's part of the game – you die, you save yourself, you tag-team yourself to allow your team to move forward.

Below you'll have a peek at Capy Games presentation of "Sloooowww Motion." While we've got our own demos of the game coming in the next few games, the developers at Capy have kindly requested that we not give too much away right off the bat. So we'll trust them, for now, to deliver a demo like this to you in the meantime.

Here you'll see the Xbox One-exclusive share-friendly replay gameplay feature, showing the "final" timeline after you've completed a level, death after death.

Like no other game we've seen in the recent past, Capy Games have been entirely truthful with gameplay VS demos delivered before the game is released. This is exactly what the game looks like and plays like on the Xbox One.

If Contra was developed in 2014, it would look a whole lot like Super Time Force – and it wouldn't be half as entertaining. Gameplay is unique, the concept is solid, and the chatter in-between sequences of action is well thought out.

This retro-futuristic piece of gaming excellence is delivered with a dash of low-brown humor as well, which we cannot resist. If Super Time Force is any indication of what the next generation of "indy" games is like, we're all over it.

This game will be released on the 14th of May, 2014 to Xbox One and Xbox 360 digitally.