Time Soldier

It's hard not to be intrigued by the idea of traveling through time and leaving your mark, which might explain why there are so many video games that have you doing exactly that. Time Soldier is a game that manages to combine that excitement of time travel with the fast paced game play of games like Mercs and Ikari Warriors. Unfortunately for Time Soldier neither aspect is very good making it one truly forgettable experience.

Time Soldier is your basic overhead shooter; it forces you to fight oncoming attackers while worrying about being too slow. For the most part you can dodge enemies, avoiding their fire (and bodies) all together. This is for the best since your firing controls are a little wonky. It's hard to get the aiming right and even hard to hit the enemy, leaving you no choice but to run and weave through enemies.

There are a few power ups you can pick up over the course of game, but none of them are especially interesting or noteworthy. These weapons are more powerful (as you'd expect), but just as hard to aim and not all that visually satisfying. And even though it always looks like you have a huge rocket launcher on your shoulder you tend to fire puny little bullets that barely cross half of the screen. What a let down.

Of course, when it comes to a time traveling adventure few people are interested in the weapons ... they want to know where you're going. Unfortunately you shouldn't get too excited, because even though you get to journey through all kinds of time periods - caveman era, world wars, Roman Empire, etc. - they all tend to look the same and reuse a lot of the same graphics. These time periods just don't stand out, you never get the feeling that you are actually shooting through these ancient locations.

There are no continues in this game, but Time Soldier does manage to provide you with more than enough extra guys to do some damage in that area. With bullets flying at extremely slow speeds and not all that many enemies to deal with at any given time, Time Soldier tends to lean a tad on the easy side. Of course, if you get tired of playing it by yourself you can bring a second playing along for the ride. But considering how lame the ride is, I doubt they'll want to stay for too long.

All this is not to say you can't find some entertainment value in Time Soldier, but it's not a journey that's ultimately worth your time or trouble. Considering that there are better games that are exactly likes this on the Master System, you should do yourself a favor and stay as far away from Time Soldier as you possibly can. The other games might not let you fight dinosaurs, but you don't really want to anyway!