Previous Next

An adventure through time. An expensive waste of time.

Scenario: Timeslip is set in the year 2641, and you play the part of Hugard, a universal Field Physicist who has invented a time machine. The first experiment you make is to travel back three seconds through a black hole but, horror of horrors, it all goes wrong and you end up 500 years back in time and without any fuel. Thankfully, the black hole is still there so, by collecting the powerful crystal arionate, you can provide enough power for your machine to travel back to 2641 - but only in steps of ten years.

Size: 50 levels providing different challenges.

This is the first games review I have ever done (and probably my last after I have finished with this game), but I actually first played a demonstration of this game on a subscriber disk from The Micro User. That's one of the only few good points about this game - at least the BBC Micro is now getting demos on cover disks like other formats. The first time I played this game, I thought that it had very good graphics even though there weren't a lot of them. Very smooth-flowing and quite nice music.

I actually thought about buying this game at full price at the time, which was £9.95, but like most things I didn't get around to it. My opinion after playing the complete game is that I would have been wasting a good £9.95 at the time. The Micro User review on the back of the box reads: "If it were budget-priced, I could thoroughly recommend Timeslip. It's the sort of game that will come out of the box from time to time rather than one for consistent and regular use." (Roger Frost, June 1992) The above quote clearly states "budget-priced" and, even at its current price of £5.95, it's not worth it in its current state.

After playing the game for several hours and a couple of hundred years into the future I found that, after my sudden demise, I was searching for a password to jump back to where I left my headstone. But, after reading through the instructions several times, searching the main screen and getting someone else to look for it. I had to give it up as a bad job, it just isn't there. The other point is that on the main options screen, if you press Escape you will actually quit the whole game and have to load the damn thing in again! This is very annoying.

The parallax scrolling, as mentioned on the back of the box, seems quite good.

As a full-priced game, I don't think it's worth the money. Maybe if it was £2.99, I would consider buying it. I am not a games programmer and I don't like to criticise other people's work but this game seems not to have been tested. I still have not played this game through to the end because after two hours, it just lost its appeal.

Sorry, this is just not a game for me.