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Time Ace
Review By: Eric Rehm
Developer: Trainwreck Studios
Publisher: Konami
Genre: Action
ESRB: Everyone 10+
# Of Players: 1-4
Online Play: No
Accessories: Wi-Fi (local)
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The normal enemies are just like the gameplay, boring and repetitive. Throughout each time zone you’ve got your normal shooters, bombers, helicopters, and bigger bombers…and that’s about it. There are some ground/sea troops, but they’re negligible. They really never pose much of a threat. Constantly firing forward will often yield a quick and easy kill, just as the enemy comes into view. The ground troops are easy to dispatch, but you can bypass them easily. The enemies never evade or dodge, for them it’s the game of "let’s run straight into the line of bullets!" The planes will sometimes ‘drop’ item upgrades, like a health pack or more bombs, or upgrades to your guns. These upgrades really break the game, because after getting a couple quickly, enemies drop almost too quickly. Your guns become more powerful in short bursts than hitting something with your bombs...it’s sort of sad.

Time Ace

The graphics are sub par, to say the least. The blocky textures and almost remedial looking character models fly by, and you can see the pixels pretty clearly. In this day and age, you’d think that the graphics wouldn’t be much of a concern for anyone anymore…however, they’re so bad in this game that it makes it hard to play, because the crappy textures make things hard to discern from one another, making some areas blend into one another. You’re still able to make out a wall or the water, but every area's walls and water look exactly the same. There’s no variance, it's only this bland gray ground or bland brown wall.

There’s also little touch screen support for the game. There is only a minor mini game before you go out on a mission, and a ill-explained special weapon selection when you’re flying around. The mini game has two versions, connecting circuits by drawing a line, or patching up holes by drawing over them. That’s it. All we’ve got, are a connect the dots type game and some repair man job? There could have been a lot more here, but the developers seemed fit to dupe us out of anything that’d be considered ‘fun.’

In the end, Time Ace is a barely playable mess of a game. We’ve seen this game repeated a million times over before, so why can’t developers give us something new? With basically no touch screen support, terrible graphics, and a case of the ‘text blocks,’ Time Ace makes me weep. Such a poor game that was not thought out well, and it really shows that it was a minor idea that someone still managed to mess up.

Bottom Line:

Don’t waste your time. There are better flight combat sims out there.

Pros:Cons:Final Score:
  • I honestly can’t think of any.
  • Poor story
  • Poor graphics
  • Poor game
2.0

Posted: 2007-12-06 20:00:46 PST