Reviewed: November 12, 2006
Reviewed by: Blake Kenny

Publisher
Digital Eclipse

Developer
Konami

Released: August 30, 2006
Genre: Arcade
Players: 2
ESRB: Everyone

6
7
7
4
5.4

Supported Features:

Over 20 years later, I’m playing it again on my Xbox 360 and while it brings back memories, especially since I loved this style of shooter when I was a kid, it was a bit of a disappointment to re-visit. Why? Because it’s nowhere near as long or as difficult as it seemed to be back them. I wanted to badly to review this game and when I got my shot I played the heck out of it for about 2 hours, but truthfully, I haven’t fired it up since (well maybe once or twice to take down few quick notes for this article). Does this make it a bad game? Well no, not really, it comes to us with a few nice improvements; it’s just not what I remember or hoped it to be, never was and still isn’t. Still, the ultimate question is quite simple, is it worth your marketplace points? Well read on and I’ll explain.

As you play, you travel through 5 different timelines. Starting in 1910 to move on to 1940, 1970, 1982, and finally 2001. The funny this is, while most timelines have planes we know, like bi-planes and World War II fighters. 2001, which was supposed to be the future back when the game came out in 1982, features UFO’s. It’s pretty funny in the year 2006 to be nowhere near Konami’s representation of a possible future.

Overall, each timeline takes only a few minutes to work thought, making the entire game a mere 15 minutes long from start to finish. Sure the game loops back around to the beginning, so you can continue to work on your high score, but either way, you’ll have seen everything there is to see in no time flat. Not much of a game when you think about it.

Overall the controls are easy to learn. Your ship can be rotated in any direction and aside from that there’s nothing you can do but fire you machine gun. No missiles to speak of, which, like the UFO’s of 2001 is humorous when you consider that even that helicopters from the 1970’s timeline have missiles. Maybe you’re from a future or culture where missiles are believed to be an unfair military advantage, I don’t know, but guns are all you get.

In addition to the brief single player scenario, there are also a few multiplayer options. Aside from having leaderboards for your best score, there’s a co-op mode and a versus mode. Par for the course, it’s difficult for me to report on this segment of the game when it’s almost impossible to find a single player anywhere on earth to join a match with. Now if I could only get my own time machine, then I could travel to the exact second when another play just happens to be looking for a game. Sadly that won’t happen, just like my continuing efforts to play online won’t happen. I spent 30 minutes looking for a match with absolutely no luck. That’s about 28 minutes longer than most of you are likely to try.

In total, the game features the usual 200 Gamerscore divided up over 12 different achievements. For the most part you can probably score all but 1 of them the first time you play the game, if not you’re sure to get them within 30 minutes even if you have to start over a few times. The only difficult, dare I say, nearly impossible achievement is the one that requires you to reach the 5th and final stage of the game without losing a single ship. Good luck with the one folks.

Another thing to get used to with this game is the illusion of movement that it uses. Unlike Geometry Wars where you have freedom to move and fly all around the screen, in Time Pilot your ship doesn’t move at all. To create the illusion of flying, your ship just rotates in the middle of the screen. Only the scenery moves, the clouds and enemy fighters move up, down, and to the left and right depending on the direction your ships is facing. It’s a neat little trick, but sometimes it can throw you off and make you feel a little trapped even though you’re supposed to be rocketing throughout the skies.