After all those enervating CRPGs this month, I needed something loud, stupid, and fun to cleanse the ol' palette. In other words, Super Time Force Ultra is exactly the tonic I needed: a run-and-gun action game that broadcasts its dumbness loud and clear with its silly, broad humor while secretly packing a lot of cleverly subtle (or subtly clever?) mechanics under its hood. The framing story, such as it is, concerns Professor Repeatski: a lonely physicist from "198X" who invents time-travel one day and decides to be the awesomest man who ever lived by travelling back through time to save the dinosaurs and Atlantis, preventing the world's destruction by his nemesis Dr. Infinity and his Blounbots, and leaving a trail of supermodel girlfriends and cool explosions in his wake. He does this with a sort of Gain Ground-reminiscent idea of recruiting warriors across time and space to make up the eponymous Super Time Force, all of whom can travel back in time to prevent their own deaths if need be.

To describe the way the game plays would be a challenge, because it feels purpose-built to be these huge convoluted messes where multiple past instances of your characters continue to act as they did while your current incarnation either makes use of the chaos their former iterations created to make progress, or take alternative routes to complete extra objectives before time-travelling back to when the path split for the sake of alacrity. Each member of the Super Time Force has their own distinct patterns - a regular attack and a charged attack - and the player is free to experiment with the members they have available, selecting the best person or creature for the immediate task at hand. However, you excel best by relying on teamwork with, well, yourself: if a boss's vulnerability appears, it's a good idea to unload on it until the boss conceals it again, rewind time to just before it appeared, and then use a second character to wail on it in addition to the first, and then repeat until the boss is annihilated or you've reduced that particular stage of the boss fight to a split second. The boss fights, with all their patterns to manipulate and select moments to double (or triple, or quadruple) down on the damage input, are the highlight of the game.

In addition to the regular stages, which can be tackled in any order besides the very first and last, there's also the "Helladeck" for training. This part of the game presents little puzzle scenarios where you have to figure out how to get all the golden collectibles - the game calls them Glorbs - before they land on the ground, shattering. In the core missions they usually fly out of glowing enemies and barricades with the player having to consider ahead of time where they need to be to intercept them before they break, but in the Helladeck they are shot out of cannons at either specific timestamps or after the player activates a switch. There's fifty of these Helladeck challenges broken up into ten tiers, each more difficult than the last, and they're frequently built to exhibit and tutorialize the talents of the Super Time Force - the bazooka-packing Jef Leppard, for instance, can rocket jump to higher platforms and there's a specific Helladeck challenge that makes use of that. While the main missions are these chaotic, wildly entertaining free-for-alls that don't require any special techniques to complete, the Helladeck challenges are the true brains of the game: a space to explore all the nuances of the characters you've recruited, since they and their skillsets are not always crucial (especially when you have a dozen or more - at that point you usually stick to your few favorites). The starting trio of Jean Rambois (fast damage output), Aimy McKillen (charged shots can pass through walls), and Shieldy Blockerson (creates barriers to deflect projectiles) can serve you for the entire game if need be, though it's best to try out the slightly stronger characters you can recruit in certain levels or unlock after collectible milestones. I personally found myself relying on Team Fortress 2's Pyro and the distaff Road Warrior Melanie Gibson a lot, because of their short-range, high-DPS attacks.

This wealth of choice and the generous limit to how many times you can zip back in time - your stock of which is also expanded by each of those Glorbs you find - can make the game feel a bit easy in spots, but that's partly where the Helladeck comes in (which is not easy at all, especially the later challenges) and the patched in Ultra Hardcore mode, which greatly boosts the attack damage of all characters but makes it so they can only exist for ten seconds. It's not quite the limitation it seems - if you're rocking the same incarnation for much more than that, you're not taking full advantage of the game's core conceit - but it does mean more careful management of the finite number of "Time Outs" you have. There's also a collectible that you can earn by completing stages extremely quickly, one that I believe unlocks the most super secret recruit of the game, which I really couldn't find it in me to pursue (I don't care for time trials, even in games built around time manipulation mechanics). I left the game happy with the amount of content the game featured and the level of challenge it presented, even if I didn't avail myself of everything it had to offer.

I gotta say, though, there is something intoxicating about this game when you're deep in its flow, and I don't just mean the discombobulating affect of having scores of prior versions of yourself running around, fighting the same enemies with perhaps a slight time delay - since, ideally, going back allowed you to move ahead sooner. It can be a little wild to get ahead of the pack thanks to the windows they've opened, only to find the whole merry bunch catching up with you as you get a head-start on the next obstacle. You can even get killed, kill the enemy that just killed you before they killed you, and then absorb the now-sorta-alive former version of yourself to double up on your damage output, creating distinctive combos if your prior and current incarnations were different team members. I suppose the true masterstroke of Super Time Force, again referring back to just how smart this game is despite it desperately trying to convince you it isn't, is that all of the above sounds like complete gibberish until you're playing the game yourself and it all clicks into place.

Super Time Force Ultra was Capybara Games's last release before they went Below for a long stretch, surfacing briefly for that supposedly decent OK K.O. tie-in game from January, and it's indicative just how far they've grown as a developer since the beautiful but rudimentary Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery LP and the solid tactical DS RPG Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes - both fine games, though they don't quite have Super Time Force's innovation and the always welcome design philosophy that focuses on choosing what's fun over what makes sense. If nothing else, it's convinced me to give that OK K.O. game a shot (and Below too, should that ever transpire).

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I remember people (maybe it was just the Bombcast crew at the time) not being as hot on this game when it came out as they seemed to be during the preview cycle, but I also remember playing it anyway and really enjoying it. Glad to see I'm not alone on that.

@generic_username: I think a huge benefit for a game as silly and weird as this is that it's super accessible in spite of its perplexing time-travel trickery. That can mean it errs on the side of being too easy at times, especially seeing as there's all sorts of ways to effectively cheat, but that's what the Helladeck is for.

I suppose I could see folk getting put off by that blocky pixel look, but people seemed to like that aesthetic in Superbrothers well enough.