Note: There's something wrong with the video on this, for some reason its stuttering, it didn't do that during game play, my recorder seemed to have a little bit of a problem.

Time Soldiers was originally an arcade game released in 1987 by Alpha Denshi and published by SNK. It was later ported to a bunch of different systems such as the Amiga, Atari ST, C64 before ending up on the Sega Master System in 1989.

There’s not much of a plot to this one, in fact it’s mentioned in the very first couple of sections after you pass the title with the evil Gylend capturing five of your comrades and placing them somewhere within five different time periods from the primitive Age, the Age of Rome. the World Wars, the Age of War and Future World.
Time Soldiers is a rare breed on the Master System as it allows for a simultaneous 2 player overhead shooter experience alongside the single player. The idea for each level is to get to the right time period by jumping through the time portals scattered throughout the stages and then fight off against the boss of that era in order to get the prisoner. You start off in a random time period and the item pickups seem to be randomized so each time that you play it you get a slightly different experience.

Graphically the game looks good with a fair amount of variety in the sprites and each of the time periods look noticeably different. The best visuals are reserved for the big boss sprites which take up a large portion of the screen. The game does tend to slow down when there's a large amount of bullets on the screen and glitching does tend to happen whilst in the multiplayer mode.

You are allowed two different guns at a time, you default pea shooter has limited range and I would recommend getting an upgrade as soon as possible. The second button serves as your special weapon which gives you more power and most importantly a longer range, but this is limited so you have to be careful when you use them – preferably when one of the many mini-bosses turn up. The game is made even more difficult due to the speed of the character they move so slowly in comparison to the enemies and their bullets that you are often at the disadvantage. You can dodge most of the enemies in the stage, but those mini-bosses have a much faster fire rate than you and move much faster than you, meaning that you will almost certainly lose your lives at these sections. It feels like it should be played with duel stick controls as often you need to be running whilst shooting behind you, it’s a shame that the devs didn’t add a feature to use 2 controllers for one player.

Overall it’s a reasonably good game and one that I have never managed to finish. As the novelty of being one of those rare instances of being a 2 player game it is certainly worth a play, but on the basis of things it is a fairly standard shooter that is a decent challenge and well worth adding to your collection.


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