The box-arts for this game do not really make for a good first impression. The European version had a very beautifully rendered cover, but one that evokes memories of Steven Spielberg's greatest works (that concerned aliens) instead of suggesting high-octane action as befitting the phrase "Commando".
The North American version's box art, while adhering to the phrase "Commando" very well, gives an impression of arcade-like gameplay, which was certainly not in this game.
Of course, a wise consumer would know that the people in Marketing and the people in Product Development may not necessarily see eye-to-eye, and the former packages a product in any way that they see fit. After having installed and played the game, the player would realize that this game has greater sophistication than its name suggests.
That is, if the player can stomach the really poorly written story first.
The premise of the game is unbelievably bizarre, perhaps even almost dream-like. The game is set somewhere in the near future, where virtual reality is the fad of the day, even in military training. A super-computer that is capable of simulating any form of combat in the history of humanity has been created in a corporate-military joint venture, though its practical purpose is not entirely rational.
(After all, which modern-day military would want to train its soldiers to fight with swords and bows, or even sticks and stones?)
What is (somewhat) clear however, is that its operation involves dangerously tearing into time to create the virtual realities that would be used for said training. As can be expected from machines that do dangerous things, something went wrong with it; the actions of a saboteur from a rival corporation were merely an excuse for a well-used plot device.
Efforts of damage control make for a great way to introduce the protagonist Stanley Opar, who is a S.A.V.E. (Special Action for Virus Elimination) operative whose employer could either be the corporation that made said computer or the military. The reasons for the peculiar choice of name for his unit and his dubious occupation are hardly mentioned, but then they are completely forgotten once the player gets into the game proper anyway.
Said protagonist gets dumped into the virtual realities that the computer had created - and which the saboteur's virus is rapidly destabilizing.
The themes of the denizens of the virtual realities depend on the timelines that their levels are based on: for some examples, the prehistoric levels will have ancient beasts and cave-men, while the later modern war levels will have infantry-men and tanks. Despite their different themes and model designs, all of them had one trait in common: they are out to slay any user of the combat training program that they belong to.
(The virus, conveniently enough, does not need to contend with them and happily sits in a virtual reality of its own that is tucked underneath all of them.)
To reach the lair of the virus, the protagonist needs to fight through the combatants of every level, often one at a time in a duel to the death (in his case, it is all too real and permanent). Every enemy combatant in the game would seem contrived, even stereotypical, to any player examining their model design.
That would be the impression until the player actually fights them. Every subsequent opponent fights in a different manner compared to the previous one and will also have advantages like being faster or is simply in a more advantageous location that the player has to figure out how to overcome. For example, early on in the game, there is an ursine end-of-level opponent who is terrifically resistant to many weapons - except one, which has a very, very slow attack animation, the execution of which that the player needs to time in between the boss's own attacks.
Speaking of weapons, every 'era', or sets of levels with the same themes, has its own bunch of weapons. The game conveniently gives a huge hint that these weapons are definitely useful against the denizens of the current level by stripping away all those from your previous ones. Of course, one can say that this game design is actually a contrivance. Yet, the game does not make the game easier by withholding information to the player, such as which specific weapon is useful against a certain opponent (e.g. the end-of-level fight mentioned earlier).
Furthermore, the game does not adhere to historical realism entirely. There are several enemies in the game that do not appear to be mortal, or are even outright absurd, and have to be defeated with some of the more exotic weapons of that level.
Other than visual hints, the game does not appear to give any more clues on how an opponent can be defeated. Considering that the game does use a system of limited 'lives', which can result in a game-over once they are expended, a player who cannot connect the dots using the visual hints will find himself/herself expending more 'lives' than needed. This in turn can lead to some frustration.
Moreover, the game does not have a proper game-saving system. A game-over means that the player has to start from scratch, with only the lessons that were learned the hard way during the previous attempt at beating the game.
In addition to the game designs mentioned above that could hamper a player's enjoyment of the game, there is also a time limit to each level that he/she has to contend with. The virus, perhaps in what can be described as an attempt to protect itself from the protagonist, attempts to derail the level that the protagonist and erase it from existence together with the latter. It does so quite slowly, but surely.
The player can collect chips that represent loose or left-over data in the creation of the level and feed it to the virus via conveniently placed ports (that look like spherical pools of water). The virus can be fooled into deleting these instead, thus further extending the time remaining needed to complete the level. However, these data chips are often located away from the obvious path of progression through a level, so the player has to risk the expenditure of time to locate these chips.
Fortunately, to the determined and observant player, the game can become easy enough once some lessons are learned. (Of course, resorting to game guides is also a solution.)
The game also provides some additional items that the protagonist can retrieve to give himself a much-needed boost for the next battle, namely health power-ups (appropriately in the form of floating batteries) that either refill his health bars or extend it (the latter kind of power-up also conveniently acts as a health refill). On the other hand, like data chips, they are located quite out of the way, so the player will have to expend some precious time searching for them - which can be aggravating if a player only has little time left to complete the last leg of a level but has little health left for the end-of-level opponent.
Regardless of how the player perceives enemies in this game to be (e.g. ridiculous, run-of-the-mill, absurd, plain hard), the player is still rewarded with a very satisfying conclusion to any fight. A tough opponent will usually have death throes that are very amusing, and if there is an opportunity for gratuitous explosions or similar dramatic effects, there will be.
This visual satisfaction is made possible via the then-cutting-edge graphics of the game at the time. Models in the game are surprisingly very curvaceous, especially that of the protagonist whose muscular-but-lean build is presented via polygons with smooth rounding that was rarely seen in games of its time. There are also no re-used models in the game, largely because the game design resorted to individualized opponents with unique traits, intrinsic or otherwise.
For its time, the game sports some terrifically well-detailed and beautiful level designs. The levels are actually hand-drawn art that had been cleverly wrapped into the frames of levels, as is apparent from the in-game models' lack of any dynamically cast shadows. Even so, as compensation, the level designers have included lighting sources at very strategic locations throughout the levels, which made the in-game models feel far, far less out-of-place than models in other games that resorted to hand-drawn backgrounds. There is also some form of anti-aliasing - which was very nascent technology at the time - used to reduce the harshness of the contrast between models and the background as well.
Time Commando indeed showed off its technical prowess in a visually appealing manner.
To complete the design of levels, panoramic sky-boxes, which were also hand-drawn, were used to cover the far-background. Most of them are static, but they serve the purpose of expressing the theme of the current level very well (as well as make for some great screenshots at the time).
The audio design of the game is not as thoroughly good as the graphics of the game though.
The sound effects in the game are created using sound clips recorded from real-world occurrences, so one can expect a tank firing a shell to be quite believably thunderous and the discharge of a Wild West era pistol to sound like what the cracks of vintage weapons should be, for example. However, the music, if there is any in a level, is very subdued and contributes little to the atmosphere of the scenario at hand.
The most disappointing setback is the lack of any appreciable voice-acting. Other than the grunts, groans and moans or other guttural noises that the in-game models make, there is not much to listen to from the protagonist and the opponents that he has to go through.
This game is certainly not a perfect one, what with its rather odd-ball premise and some gameplay designs (namely the time limit mechanic and lack of a game-saving feature) that are detrimental to its sense of being fun. Still, what it does well, it does surprisingly very so.
In conclusion, Time Commando may not be a game for those who cannot stomach absurdity or lack of game mechanics that are taken for granted, but if a player is looking for a visually impressive game with a healthy dose of challenge, this game is recommended.