Time Recoil

I'll be straight with you: if you walked into this expecting to find your next couch co-op banger, Time Recoil will let you down before the title screen fades. This one is a solo affair through and through, and that's a real shame because the core loop is the kind of thing you'd love to show off to a friend sitting next to you. You kill an enemy, time slows. You chain another kill in that window, time slows further and a special ability charges. Stack enough consecutive kills and you unlock progressively wilder moves: a quick dash through a wall, a room-clearing time blast, eventually a full freeze that lets you line up shots at your leisure. It feels like being the Matrix lobby scene for about three gloriously chaotic seconds, then someone shoots you in the back and you restart the level. The structure across its 56 stages is short and punishing in equal measure. Most levels last somewhere between 20 seconds and a couple of minutes when things go well, but they're one-hit-kill arenas where a pistol-toting grunt around a corner ends your run instantly. Your starting loadout is just a basic pistol; rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns come from enemies you drop along the way, and ammo is scarce enough that trigger discipline actually matters. The melee strike exists on paper but reviewers and players broadly agree it is too imprecise and low-damage to rely on in a real bind. What saves the difficulty from becoming pure frustration is that death restarts you at the top of the current level rather than sending you back through a lengthy checkpoint chain. Each stage is short enough that learning the enemy layout through repeated deaths feels more like a puzzle than a grind. The time-manipulation mechanic is where 10tons earned their money here. Chaining kills requires you to plan a route through each room before you enter it, because barging in and hosing bullets around will get you killed before the slowdown has a chance to kick in. That strategic layer lifts it above the pure reflex test of something like Crimsonland, and it draws fair comparisons to Hotline Miami, minus the stealth angle. The game sits in that genre neighbourhood comfortably without quite reaching those heights. Objectives cycle across three flavours across the campaign: retrieve intel or items, kill everyone in a zone, or reach an exit. Variety is modest. A Time Attack mode unlocks for completed levels and challenges you to earn fast-completion stars, but the target times are genuinely brutal and most players will bump into this mode, acknowledge it exists, and move on. On the downside, the story told through text-based comic panels is convoluted in a way that adds little, the visuals are functional rather than striking, corridor environments repeat themselves visually, and there is zero multiplayer of any kind. If you and your group were hoping to run a Saturday night session on this one, look elsewhere. For a solo player who enjoys mastering short, high-skill levels and unlocking cleaner kill routes, the combination of bullet-time flow and tight controller support makes for a genuinely satisfying few evenings. Steam user reviews sit at 80 percent positive across a modest sample, which tracks: it is a solid game with clear limits, not a revelation.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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