Новини
Time Commando travels to the past and punches things
M
Matt Paprocki
Consider this: Time Commando puts Stanley Opar under the player’s control. He wears a bright yellow suit and enters a time loop created by a computer virus in order to save the world. Thanks to video game logic, that means punching and kicking cavemen. And samurai. A few medieval knights. Oh, and some cowboys, modern people, and eventually, the rogue virus itself.
There are few greater joys than Time Commando. Unlike its fellow time-themed contemporaries like Time Cop, Time Trax, and Timeslip (time was cool in the ‘90s), it lets you knock out Japanese warlords with a flurry of ungainly kung-fu moves. Stanley Opar is the ultimate man of action.
Throughout the game, you wander through pre-rendered video backdrops that play and follow our desperate hero. Opar himself is a ruthless killer, hopped up on a bunch of technological propaganda under the corporate banner of SAVE (Special Action for Virus Elimination). Seeing these historical figures evaporate from my assault, I can only wonder what they thought upon seeing Stanley. They wear furs, armor, samurai garb, and ten-gallon outlaw hats. But there’s my Stanley, all decked in yellow (or, more accurately, yellow from the future).
It’s not as if Time Commando offers negotiating tactics. Opar walks forward, encounters what he assumes is a foe, then punches it. His victims' final thoughts: probably a sort of befuddlement. It begs the question of what happens if Opar dies in early Japan. Time Commando doesn't offer an answer.
Eventually, Stanley gets a gun. That makes things easier, and certainly more confusing for those who feel his wrath. Before that, he wields a club and sword. Turns out Stanley knows how to use them all; he’s a ruthless killer, even if Time Commando initially portrays him as a high-ranking computer geek. Like Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, one can only assume his days off are spent preparing himself for inevitable life-or-death combat. He’s Rambo, but for time travel.
Time Commando has the logic of a Saturday morning cartoon, even if the violence is more “real” than those goofy hand-drawn characters. All of those future fears about world-ending computers seemed so rationally cool in the 1990s.
And sure, if someone asked me to travel back in time to give a prehistoric tiger a black eye, the only logical response is: “Of course!” It's the perfect premise for a video game. That goes double if I get to wear a badge proclaiming me THE Time Commando, and triple if I get to call myself Stanley.
Time Commando is available on the Epic Games Store.