Playing A Game Super Time Force Ultra PC

Super Time Force Ultra - as its tongue-barely-in-cheek name suggests - takes a fun and flippant approach to sci-fi storytelling. Not unlike No Time to Explain, its absurdist attitude toward time-travel-induced chaos is a great hook.

The problem with STFU is that ... well, while I admire its unique twists on time-rewinding mechanics, the resulting gameplay tends to be more confusing and frustrating than it is fun.

If you die, you can rewind time to before your death, and drop in as another character -- or as another copy of the same character. You can even prevent your first death by shielding that character or pre-emptively taking out your killer. Neat, right?

It's also really hard to pull off, in terms of avoiding and pre-empting whatever killed you before. Most often, the best I could do was to jump out of the way and leave my previous self to die again.

Alternatively, if you rewind time without dying, you can drop in another character to combine forces. This is especially useful in boss fights, so you can unload lots of bullets, or hit multiple weak spots, at the same time; but coordinating these characters while simultaneously avoiding a boss's attacks is pretty difficult.

This "combine forces with yourself" mechanic is incentivized by having a time limit on each level -- forcing you to stack characters up instead of having just one character plink away at an obstacle. But a nasty side-effect of these time limits is that the farther you get in a level, the greater chance you have of getting "stuck" and not having enough time left to finish.

And what's the solution to that? Why, rewinding time some more, of course; in effect, replaying the level, but faster. Which is more than a little tedious.

Again, while I admire STFU's attempts to be more sophisticated than dumb-chaos run-and-guns like Broforce, I don't think those attempts really paid off. Making good use of time-rewinding is hard, and most often just feels repetitive.

Progress: Finished the intro level, almost(?) finished the Year 673 level.

Rating: Meh