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Mitsota Reviews: Killing Time

Mitsota101Jun 1, 2018, 3:16:30 PM
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Killing Time is a hilariously bad first person shooter developed in-house by 3DO in 1995 as a last ditch effort to increase sales of their home entertainment system "The 3DO". The version I'm playing is the superior Windows 95 port, devolved and released a year later by Logicware, who more or less rebuilt the game from the ground up.

Unlike shooters of the time, Killing Time follows an elaborate plot through a consistent game world with in-level cutscenes, as opposed to plopping the player into a themed level pack with per-rendered cutscenes book-ending the shooting. Real actors can occasionally be spied on as the player wanders the grounds, acting out the events that led up to the game. These cutscenes are among the few things salvaged from the mess that was the 3DO version. (although they are much lower quality here for some reason.)

Look at how real those actors are!

The player controls Rick, an archeology student who looks to recover a priceless Egyptian artifact that was stolen from his professor by Tess Conway; An eccentric billionaire who has been collecting holy artifacts. Once Rick arrives on Tess private island, a story begins to slowly unravel about love triangles, mobsters, and blood curses.

As the player wanders around the estate and it's grounds looking for keys and ammunition, they'll encounter a metric fuckton (to use the technical term) of enemies. Groundskeepers, hunters, mafioso, dire bees, ugly maids, pretty maids, giant roaches, angry chefs, floating skulls, just to name a few. Originally most of these enemies were also digitized actors, but they have been redrawn for this Windows port.

Rick fights of a feces monster

The player has a modest arsenal of weapons to defend themselves with, a crappy crowbar, a pair of low power revolvers, an actually decent shotgun, a tommy gun that eats up ammo far too quickly, molotovs that Rick can barely lift, let alone throw, a flamethrower that can 1shot most enemies, but wastes excess fuel if you're up against 1 enemy at a time, and ankhs that can be used to instantly kill any enemy, but these are highly rare. The player can also collect "Vessels", one time use powerups that can be saved and activated at the player's discretion. These powers are all somewhat useful, ranging from showing enemies on the map to invisibility to infinite ammo.

The level design here is kind of obnoxious, there are quite a few mazes spread throughout the Conway Estate, and while these have been significantly toned down by the new dev team, they're still a pain to navigate. This is amplified by a bug in the Windows 95 port that prevents the map from zooming out to it's fullest, severely limiting it's usefulness. Most of the time I found myself making a save state, exploring an area, then loading the state and simply ignoring the area, as it was a waste of health and ammo that leads to a dead end.

Welcome to dead-end island!

Speaking of level design, let's talk about the Egyptian horror theme the game sometimes has. The main character in the ghost cutscenes encountered around the estate, Tess Conway, is obsessed with eternal youth, and seeks a blessing from Isis to live on even in death, as Osiris had when Seth chopped him into pieces. The writers portray this story fairly accurately, (minus the blood clock thing, but hey, it's a plot device to put the player on the island) yet later when Angela speaks to the player, she miss-identifies Thoth as the god with a "Body of a man, head of a baboon", when Thoth is usually depicted as having a crane's head; and I've never seen a man with an ape head in Egyptian mythology. It just feels weirdly inconsistent to me. I dunno, I guess they were banking on their game not selling well with history students?

Anyway, back to the level design. I really enjoyed the first half of the game or so. While the weapons on offer are limited, it's pretty fun to explore the fairly pretty grounds of the property, and the early areas of the game are really fun. But the farther into the house I got, the worse and worse it got. After I wandered through the dungeon of a wine cellar, swam and fought through human waste in the maze-like sewer, and then washed up in a temple, I was starting to give up hope on seeing a normal level, and then I enter the library. the on-fire, jumping puzzle filled library. Then hope finally blossomed when I entered the hedge maze and found out that the correct path is more or less told to you by Angelica, that was a pleasant section.

"Yeah, go left" -bad child actor

And how does the game end, you ask? Why, that's quite simple: you need to do 2 more laps around the property, of course! One to find all the vessels so you can open the door to the boss room, then one more lap with an unkillable boss monster hunting you while you smash water clocks hidden around the property, THEN you can kill the boss monsters.

I'm not sure how I survived to the end of this game, it seems like they were trying desperately to stretch the game out when it clearly should have let me cop out with a bad ending after I picked up every key, like the 3DO version. I appreciate the effort, but making me slog through every area I've already emptied of enemies is not how you extend gameplay. Not to mention I barely had the ammo to kill the final boss, I had to save scum like crazy during the third lap, just so I had a spare few bullets for the boss.

After scouring the internet for walkthoughs, I found 2 speedruners who both swore by easy mode, so maybe it was my mistake for taking on medium mode right away. All in all, I'd say Killing Time was alright. Middle of the road clasic shooter with good ol' keyboard controls. Coming in hot off the heels of Doom 2 and before Duke Nukem 3D hit the scene, I can see why this game would have been incredible back in the day, but playing it in current year; I'd say it hasn't aged too well.

4/10; too many mazes, not enough ammo.