POSTED 2/2/11


TIME MACHINE: ROGUE PILOT

Lesta Studio
PS3/PSN

There’s a time machine, see? It travels through time, see? From the Stone Age to the future, see? It’s really amazing, see? Actually, what we see is just another match three game...

Yep, Columns, Bejeweled – you likely know the types - but given a retro-futuristic look, and a rather loopy plot trying to tie together that and a sticky-taped on ‘spot the anachronism’ game that makes Battlefield Earth seem logical. Well, not really, as we still can’t work out all those massive snotty-gobble dribbling aliens on jaunty Batman angles, but it’s pretty nutty.
 
You nab jewels within jewels from matching three or more same colour jewely things via laser cannon blasts, as Ilona (who looks like the tall chick from Shakespears Sister) watches on with disdain. Well, until you start bagging the bling and she perks up. Materialistic bitch! Accumulate enough shininess and you advance, where you do the same again, but with added impediments like unboomable objects. Then you get to the mini-game bit, where stuff that doesn’t belong to the time period you’re in is scattered about a landscape, and you have to crosshair it into oblivion. Basically it’s Where’s Wally, without the natty striped top.

You can score bonus stuff that wreaks extra havoc on your gemular grid if you score enough – lightning, bombs and such – which can make for some nice screen-clearing, earth-shattering KABOOMs, but when they do go off you’ll quite possibly have NFI why. Shit just seems to happen via rapid-fire cascade that you never feel particularly in control of.

Despite 36 gem levels, value-adding bonus modes and two-player options, the appallingly named Time Machine: Rogue Pilot lacks the sort of drug-like ‘just one more’ pull of the likes of Bejeweled. But it’s still fuck-tonnes better than Battlefield Earth...

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