Timewell Universe: Trail of Celestes is the first installment in Timewell Universe where Space Shooter genre meets story driven gameplay and Space RPG. Can you uncover the truth behind the struggle of supreme beings known as Celestes and their formidable opponents, Constructs?
Story Mode: A tale of suspense and deceit takes place in exotic corners of the galaxy. You control a Vulcan class space fighter as the A.I. SAT-V. Can you guide her to her destiny on this RPG themed space shooter?
Skills / Adaptations: Having an artificial personality of its own, SAT-V can adapt to varying degrees of difficulties and change its capabilities via skills and adaptations. You can change skill points and perks on the fly and enhance your gameplay with different tactics. Can you overcome perils with brain as well as brawn?
Achievements / Relics: Fun feats that can be unlocked throughout the game provide Relics as rewards and they are added to your inventory on each play through. These relics are alien artifacts that can boost SAT-V’s stats and skills. Once unlocked via Achievements, Epic and Legendary Relics provide unique boosts to your gaming style.
Customize Looks: You can customize look and feel of your ship with paint modes randomly looted from enemies. When unlocked, they are yours and you can use them on each play through.
Skirmish Mode: For casual players, fast skirmish mode with different world settings is also included. Each zone has a secret mini-boss to encounter. Are you up for the challenge for this space shooter?
Easter Eggs: Funny (and somewhat mysterious?!) easter eggs wait for you to be discovered. Can you solve the riddles of The Unfathomable Scholar ? Can you ?!
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I tried the game and had to stop because portions of the dialogue sound like they are just copying the script. In addition using a Text to speech device for the main character is not a good look for a released game.
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Introduction
Humanity’s last hope for a new home is an Artificial Intelligence constantly misled by cryptic alien messages. Nothing wrong with that at all. Or is it? I consider it a rocky start as far as Steam debuts go, but developer OZBER CIN has certainly poured heart and soul into this self-published project that has some nice ideas at its core, before it all gets unraveled by poor execution.
I’ve never seen a more on-rails SciFi experience without actually being on-rails. It’s not Rambo: The Video Game in space, fear not. But perhaps it could have been a meme treasure trove under those circumstances. Not a saving grace in sight though.
Story
The game’s intro sequence is pretty much the whole story condensed in a straightforward manner. By the 32nd century, Earth has finally had enough with humans and it tries a hard reset which I am actually predicting to occur far sooner than that. Two centuries from now, give or take. I’m probably too optimistic here. Anyway, we see a focus on South America and that’s a welcomed change from the more ubiquitous North America, courtesy of Hollyweird.
Megacorporations have built an AI capable of deep space exploration, fully integrated into a recon vessel that’s still armed to the teeth. Diplomacy failed before it even had a chance. And why leave humanity’s future in the hands of obviously self-aware AI? Lady Skynet could just go radio silent, provided she can even send reports back on Earth in the first place.
What happens next is kinda pulled out of Mass Effect minus the intriguing bits: alien tech draws the attention of a sentient race of genocidal machines which are hellbent on stopping our intrepid digital heroine (a female avatar, Sat-V). The antagonists are discount Reapers called Constructs, but equally shifty is the suspiciously helpful alien going by a collective nickname of Celeste. “I am Legion, for we are many”.
Not a bad start, albeit not very original. If only it would have been more fleshed out, like showing Sat-V’s departure from Earth or at least more information relating to its creators. We’re just thrown in the thick of it, in the middle of an asteroid field. It's a rapidly deteriorating situation and without further explanation. The titular timewells are jump gates across predetermined locations. Mass Relays by any other name…
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2863992561
Graphics
Advertised as an Unreal Engine 4 project, but you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for Unreal Engine 3 instead. The first cracks on Timewell: Trail of Celestes proverbial surface begin to show up at its performance level. For some inexplicable reason, the game is locked at 45fps no matter how much you may try to fiddle with the in-game options or outside of them (Nvidia Control Panel was of no use in this case).
Even the cheapest consoles today can push solid 60fps, so 45 frames per second are unacceptable for a 2022 Steam release. The few exceptions are reserved for older titles such as LA Noire, whose facial animations were hard-coded for 30fps.
As if performance wasn’t locked in an immovable state already, the intrusive HUD cannot be disabled to mimic the arguably beautiful images shown on the game’s Steam Store page. Nevermind a Free Camera / Photo Mode which might provide side and frontal views of the ship.
Perspective follows the backside thrusters at all times, so it’s a fixed camera with eye-sore HUD elements that can only be partially hidden in the lower side of the screen. System-wise, this game won’t put a strain on any PC assembled in the past decade. Unlocking the frame rate and offering V-sync are things we seem to take for granted though. Timewell disagrees.
Audio
There’s voice acting, yet I won’t dwell a lot on its quality. Consider it phoned in, with the enthusiasm of someone who clearly wasn’t pleased with their paycheck. The infamous Dinklebot from the first Destiny showed more emotion than Sat-V.
Don’t even get me started on the growls and hisses made by the aliens. Soundtrack was the equivalent of elevator music, but I am already used with this, so I muted them without a second thought and just kickstarted my own playlist.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2863992540
Gameplay
When I say faux on-rails, I mean it. Imagine a space ship which can’t ascend or descend, it simply files at a fixed altitude at all times. It’s bound to hit obstacles eventually, right? And I don’t mean the invisible walls of the level design. Those are annoying enough as it is. For a title which emphasizes on space exploration, there’s alarmingly little of that in Timewell.
No open world, not even large open levels or a a map that could allow custom waypoints. Between the shooting galleries consisting of a few Construct enemy types, you’re given a scanning option for points of interest. No mini games, fortunately. Just some hovering drones which serve only this auxiliary role outside combat. The weapon upgrades counterbalance the overall arcade feel.
The limiting levels I could compare to the first entries in the submarine-based Aquanox series, since I have no recollection of an outer space project with such location restrictions in place. And even those aforementioned submarines could ascend and descend, in retail releases from two decades ago. The silent tutorial has an interesting design in terms of its static instruction panels.
And the Skirmish mode is mercifully sparing us of trodding through the linear progression of that flimsy storyline. Instead, we can jump right in those shooting sections across 8 levels. One of them is called “Planet Xibalba”, so the Mesoamerican mythology links nicely with the game’s narrative attempts in spite of the end results.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2863992584
Verdict
The final nail in Timewell: Trail of Celestes’ coffin, has to be the pricing which is by no means reflected in the delivered product. I had to “power through” the last couple of hours in this game, since I had pretty much already seen its potential within the first 30 minutes. For the average player whose attention span is much lower than my patience, this can only spell disaster for a project that’s clearly not meant to be a lazy cash grab.
It’s not low effort, just the result of inexperience and lack of a development team capable of applying division of labour. While the performance can probably be tweaked and the fps increased to the “golden standard” of 60, I doubt the vessel controls can further allow for the spatial freedom they deserve. At the very least this is a lesson from which I can only hope OZBER CIN will learn and apply to a future project.
Strong Points
+ Steam Achievements.
+ Sense of progression through upgrades.
Weak Points
- Restrictive level design, no exploration.
- No Steam Trading Cards.
- Weird frame rate lock.
- Stiff controls.
Zitat:
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Just what I need to satisfy my desire to get into an old-school space shooter.
I've liked the story so far and it makes me want some more.
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Release:12.09.2022
Genre:
Action-Rollenspiel
Entwickler:
OZBER CIN
Vertrieb:keine Infos
Engine:keine Infos
Kopierschutz:keine Infos
Franchise:keine Infos
Einzelspieler
Mehrspieler
Koop
Kein Prisoner hat oder wartet auf das Spiel
