My father came out of the Air Force with some valuable job experience, a recipe for something called S.O.S. (if you don't know what that is, just be thankful ...) and a wealth of stories, anecdotes and sayings, ready to be imparted to my brother and I in later years. One of those pre-Vietnam turns of phrase, "running out of airspeed, altitude and ideas," came to mind while I was playing Time Ace and just would not go away. It describes the overall gameplay very well, I'm sad to say.
The basic premise of Time Ace is that you are a very naive genius who invented a time machine a few years before the World War I. Your evil assistant, of course, immediately bonked you on the head, stole said time machine and is now bent on world domination through superior firepower stolen from the future. Since Dr. Who isn't around to take care of your mess, the only thing to do is cause more temporal contamination by stuffing your spare time machine into your biplane, take off after him and shoot up anyone who gets in your way.
The steampunk backstory and the biplane you start off with do set up the game nicely. The introduction is enjoyable, long enough to be satisfying but brief enough to get you into the action. The cut scenes you get later in the game are similarly well done and also get you back into the action quickly. The actual missions are where Time Ace develops engine trouble.
When you read the box, Time Ace appears to be a free-flying aerial combat game, and parts of it do fit that description. However, for the most part, it's actually a rail shooter. Even when you can do some free flight, the game will direct you back to your current objective. There's a very large arrow on the screen pointing the way, for one thing. If you ignore the really big arrow, you hit an invisible wall at the map borders. About half of the time, the game flips your plane around, sending you back the way you came. The other half, you get flipped around and promptly explode and die.
Even in the "free flight" missions, there are times when it's impossible to loop around and fly back the way you came. This becomes an issue due to the placement of special items on the game map. These specials can add such things as health, ammunition reloads or fuel for your afterburners. If you miss one of these specials, whether or not you can swing around and pick it up depends entirely on what mission you are on. There is no consistency in this and no way to tell if it's possible until you try it. Even when you can, you're at risk of running into the map border and causing the whole flip around/explode and die experience.
Since many of the missions involve targets that are best destroyed using missiles, and missiles are in limited supply, it's common to wind up wanting to search the area for a missile reload special. When you can't do that without exploding and dying and can't destroy your objective in the time allotted without missiles, beating the mission becomes a matter of running it over and over until you find a way to grab the specials upfront rather than using your aerial combat skills.
One of the major disappointments in Time Ace is that the touch screen functions seem to be almost an afterthought. The only use it has in regular gameplay is triggering three seldom-usable special abilities. Between missions, you get a small mini-game in which you used the stylus to "weld" tears in a piece of sheet metal closed in order to score more health at the start of the next mission. All in all, though, the touch screen's potential is simply wasted.
Time Ace is not a bad game, especially in the missions where free-flight is possible. Unfortunately, trying to alternate between being a flight sim and a rail shooter results in a game that does neither well. It feels like the design team was divided into two camps, free-flight vs. rail shooter, and each decided to do their own thing no matter what the other team said. This inconsistency significantly degrades what is otherwise a lighthearted and enjoyable game.
I work in IT support for a major defense contractor, where I’m surrounded by gamers, geeks, MMO addicts, SCA folk, and tabletop RPG players. I also had the good fortune to meet and marry another lifetime gamer, Alladania. Our daughter Alissa just turned seven and has autism. It can be difficult to do activities as a family, so online gaming has become our primary form of social contact over the last few years.
