Killing Time: Resurrected Review

I have never even heard of this game before Nightdive Studios announced they were remastering it, I thought it was going to be a POed situation where it was going to a remaster of an obscure 90s console FPS where the initial game wasn't well made at all. To my surprise, Killing Time turned out to be a solid game. It isn't going to light your world on fire but at the same time, the fact that the game came out in 1995 and features design that would pop in Resident Evil and Quake 2. It also has a decently told narrative that doesn't get in the way of the game. It has more story than Doom and Quake but doesn't use narrative as a means to drive the gameplay as much as Half Life did.

The best way of describing Killing Time is that what if you got older Doom's gunplay with the Egyptian motif and item collecting of Powerslave, with Resident Evil's mansion but with Quake 2's zone based level progression? You get this game.

The gunplay is pretty solid all though some weapons like the pistol and tommy gun can sound weak at first, the sound of the tommy gun started to grow on me, the shotgun is decently powerful, and there is the flamethrower. You will mainly be using the shotgun, tommy gun and flamethrower.

What I also love about the gunplay is that enemies react to getting shot and they make groaning sounds while getting hit and some enemies make a *smack* sound when killed and it's satisfying to hear every time. It sounds weird that I'm praising a game for this but not every game does what I'm saying and it tells me the devs of Killing Time understand what makes shooting in any game satisfying.

There is some innovations to Killing Time that never appeared in the FPS genre again like how red health orbs damage you upon picking them up which while novel mainly just revolves around waiting few seconds before moving on forward.

One thing that does make Killing Time innovating is the level design it's basically Resident Evil meets Quake 2 meets Powerslave. You have the big overarching mansion and it's outside areas and key collecting that opens certain doors of RE, with areas being seperated into different level zones like Quake 2 and you need to collect items in order to get to the final boss like Powerslave.

The story is also pretty decently presented...if you choose to watch the optional cutscenes scattered throughout the levels, I intially didn't but I slowly started to and its a well made story considering the time the game was made in. The live action cutscenes are moderately well acted too.

This is where I lean towards the negatives, much of it is due to the level design, and while it is ambitous, it's suffers from being the first of it's kind problem since it is cutting edge, it also means it has problems games released later would avoid.

Two big issues is that knowing where to go requires a walkthrough half the time and the excessive down time and they are interconnected. Trying to figure out where to go on your own can be very confusing on top of even somewhat ruining the game for later sections. It's never made clear where the player is supposed to be going since there is no clear order to beat the levels. I'm not asking for the game to hold my hand but knowing what keys works on each door is a guessing game and this leads to excessive down time of looking all over the map to figure out which keys work with each door. The map isn't very helpful since it's like many 90s FPS in game maps but I can excuse it in those games since the maps in them were small and aren't overly sprawling.

This can also lead to the aforementioned excessive down time, for example, I killed most of the enemies in the outdoors areas because I didn't know where the next level in the walkthrough I was following was supposed to be. As a result, by the end of the game, when making my treks to the final few areas a lot of it was downtime with nothing happening.

Resident Evil avoids this by having the game spawn Hunters when making the return trip to the Mansion after a story milestone. Quake 2 doesn't have you spend the entire game in one zone and then you move on to another part of the Strogg homeworld. Killing Time doesn't do either of these as a result, it makes all the down time trekking all the more tedious especially in a game that is about killing enemies.

Final negative is that the final section is pretty bad, you need to destroy 6 macguffins across the mansion map in order to get to the final boss while getting chased by a stalker monster, but you need a guide to effectively find the macguffins on a first time playthrough since the multicolored doors could mean anything all of this is happening while constantly be attacked by a stalker monster which makes me want to use a walkthrough that much more.

To top is all off, the final boss is super easy with the amount of items you collected through the game.

Overall, Killing Time is a solid and ambitous game for something I never heard of and it generally holds up well