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Capy Games' time-bending, side-scrolling shoot 'em up Super Time Force is "definitely" coming this year, Capy president Nathan Vella told Polygon. The Xbox Live Arcade game, which has been playable in various incarnations featuring evolving gameplay mechanics, is now feature-locked, he said.
At PAX Prime, Capy had the most recent build of Super Time Force, which included two new playable characters, a shotgun-wielding soldier named Melanie Gibson and an anthropomorphic turd by the name of Squirt. Capy's ratcheting up the toilet humor with Squirt, who can fart a cloud of gas well beyond his tiny size, then shoot it, causing it to explode.
Almost every time we've played Super Time Force, it's played differently. After adding a Time Out mechanic earlier this year to lessen the time penalty related to dying and a rewind feature that let players insert themselves into a level's timeline of their choosing, Capy tweaked the way rescuing one of your fallen Super Time Force comrades works. Now, instead of giving players one more life upon which to draw, players will get an extra hit point for their character whenever they save someone who died earlier in the timeline.
That action also combines the charged attack powers of the two (or more) characters. For example, if you're Aimy McKillin (formerly Lady Sniper) and you rescue Jean Rambois, when you fire your combined charge attack, her piercing sniper round and Rambois' spread beam will fire at the same time. A blue-tinted trail effect also follows your character when this happens, accentuating the super power.
Also new — to me, at least — was a time-slowing power-up and the inclusion of collectible golden gems that are hidden throughout each of the game's levels, as was a ranking screen that graded players based on their performance and how many collectibles they managed to pick up.
Super Time Force's PAX Prime demo plunged headfirst into toilet humor, tossing players into a sewer level where deadly poo gushed forth from waste pipes and players battled a massive poo-spewing turd golem.
The game is slated to come to Xbox Live Arcade first, sometime before the end of the year. At PAX, Vella reminded us of Capy's stance to bring all of its games to multiple platforms, Super Time Force included.
