Timespinner Reviews

Feels like an Atari oldschool game, which is not bad. But the game is imbued with modern societal righteousness, which is a "no no zone" for me. I don't want to do politics when i am playing, I stoped playing when it became way too obvious (mid game ?).

I'm glad I finally got around to playing this game when my metroidvania itch came back up. timespinner was very mechanically (and honestly emotionally) satisfying to play through, and I can't wait to play the sequel. the game wears its inspiration on its forehead; it's like a mix of mostly Castlevania order of ecclesia and some of the other ig-vania games. satisfying progression, story choices, quests, characters, writing, the whole shabang. I'll admit that the difficulty was on the lower end, but that's not a detractor for me personally. once again, cannot wait for the sequel.

Surprisingly good. I decided to buy it after beating Order of Ecclesia and wanting more and yeah, Timespinner is exactly what the doctor prescribed. It pulls it's ascetic and music from ye old SquareSoft from the SNES era and does so beautifully. Copying the fundamental without being derivative is exactly what you want when making an homage so no complain from me. It even made me nostalgic. Its gameplay on the other hand comes from Order of Ecclesia, to a fault at times. It does add its own spin at times, but whatever Order of Ecclesia did, it follows suit most of the time. It's good though, but lack the secret sauce. I feel there is too many orbs and too many things to level. In Order of Ecclesia, when you level up your fire mastery, you can reuse it for every fire abilities. But here, what is the point of levelling the blue orb if I am never going to use it ever again? It also good to weird places with the Blood Orb, Eye Orb and the lab level. Not sure it is fitting. You can sense that the dev went for it because he wanted it to be there at least, so it helps making it not too jarring. All in all, I recommend and can't wait for the sequel.

A mediocre at best metroidvania that capitalizes on its similarity to Symphony of the Night and the SNES aesthetic that it adopts. The game looks good in its pixel-art sprites and backgrounds, even if the art design is not that great. Music is fantastic though, very Castlevania-like and a few tracks are quite memorable. For being a game about time travel there is a severe lack of different time periods to explore, having only two of them, a futuristic "present" setting and a medieval-like "past", with very few connections and interactions between them. Both game worlds are quite flat and small, not having much verticality, and both maps are put to shame when compared to other titles in the genre. Gameplay-wise this is a typical metroidvania having 2D platforming, exploration and backtracking once new abilities are found. However there is not enough enemy and weapon variety, regular enemies and their attacks are lame, and the titular mechanic to stop time serves for little more than to create temporal platforms out of enemies to reach higher places. There are some secondary quests regarding collecting items but that's it. Boss fights are cool though and traversal abilities like dashing and high-jump are fun to use. Even among all the mediocre stuff the story is easily the worst part of the game. The setting is good enough, there is decent lore about a planetary war between a colony and a metropole and some mystical tribe in one of the planets but none of this is explored in enough depth and is provided just as a background. I wish the game had spent more time in developing the world in its secondary quests instead of focusing on the love life of the various evidently non-heterosexual and/or polyamorous characters, as the game makes a huge deal about that both in dialog between characters and in notes found throughout the game. It was a wasted opportunity to tell an interesting sci-fi fantasy story instead of a cringe-inducing fanfiction. The main character is on a quest to repair the damage done, save the world and find out who she is, and will find a laughable and overused plot twist down the line while facing comically evil one-dimensional antagonists without clear motivations, all culminating in a pretty non-sensical (but cool) battle that came out of nowhere. Or that's what I remember as I can't be bothered to replay it just to be sure. Honestly I can't recommend it by its merits, it's good that it exists for people that is interested in that representation stuff but it's clearly not for me as I don't care for that, and I wish it had been marketed better to make it more clear.

Good game overall. Has some performance issues here and there for some reason. Not to crazy hard and will not make you over think anything.

I am a lover of Metroidvania's fist and foremost. Although Castlevania and Metroid are my primary interests, this is my personal fav no CV/Metroid Metroidvania game. The atmosphere is just as good as Hollow Knight without the Dark Soulish difficulty of Hollow Knight. The soundtrack is banger after banger. Movement in this game is super smooth. Very Castlevania SOTN smooth. I am a lore junkie and this game doesn't disappoint on that front. Overall, it's a 10/10 for me.

A very solid, well-paced adventure. It's a bit short and light on content, and the writing is kinda not great, but the gameplay is on point. The map is a bit basic, and they could have done more with the time mechanic in terms of map changes, but it's still fun to explore. Movement is good, combat is good, lots of build variety, and the new game+/multiple endings help make up for how short it is. Not best-in-class, but a good A-tier/8/10 title.

I largely enjoyed the gameplay. Past a certain point everything except boss fights felt kinda easy, but I still had a good time with it. The time-stopping mechanism was neat, and helpful, and usually not needed, but clutch in boss fights and a few other circumstances. Platforming wasn't too painful, and it was usually pretty clear whether I should be able to make a jump or if I'd have to wait until I got some sort of better traversal ability. I did sometimes have a hard time finding a thing I was looking for, I had to scour the map a couple times to find "OK, where can I advance?" I *really* appreciated a number of things about the story, the two biggest being [spoiler]it starting out as a stereotypical "There's A Bad Guy Stop Them" plot but acquiring nuance[/spoiler] and [spoiler]good LGBTQ+ representation[/spoiler]. The story-stuff isn't super-dense, though; it's more "along the way" (makes sense for a platformer). The Orb system was neat, especially being able to combo in jewelry from different orbs. The quests were very vanilla. But what kept me playing was the narrative, and some exploration-itch.

Fun little Metroidvania with good LGBTQ+ representation. Short game, took me around 8 hours to complete the main story. Like every Metroidvania there is a bit of a grind after to get everything unlocked. Fun overall, and would recommend.

I watched Dr4gonBlitz play this on his stream and was intrigued to play this. I have not been disappointed at all. The story so far is well done and I absolutely love the sound track and the retro graphics. Controls are smooth. Definitely recommend this.