I admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect from Out of Time before I played it, which is unusual for me in this day and age. I play scores of new games a year and usually have a handle on what a new game will be from trailers and vibes alone, but I honestly went into Out of Time expecting something different to what I got.
Imagine, if you will, a multiplayer Survivor-like with a Fortnite-y aesthetic and an emphasis on pure grind. That’s what Out of Time is. It has that Fortnite-esque humour, and certainly the kind of premise you might see in a season of Epic’s battle royale behemoth. A cataclysmic event called “The Shattering” has wrecked Earth and warped multiple timelines, which is more or less all the context you’re given.
Out of Time wastes no time at all, ironically, in dropping you into a third-person world where you’ll autoshoot anything that enters your immediate vicinity. You can also melee enemies, or deal out extra damage with special attacks determined by your gear-based class. Loot drops fast, XP fills even faster, and with these two elements come new abilities and possibilities. It’s super fast-paced and incredibly moreish.
The rather mental tutorial section is thematically in keeping with what the rest of the game will be. It’s a random assortment of enemies and loot, with very little restraint or cohesion. Sometimes you’re fighting a giant bear, sometimes robots, skeletons, or …foxes? Whatever, stop asking questions and get grinding.
Inifinitopia is the on-the-nose name of the hub city, in which you can see everyone’s avatar running around while you customise yours. There’s a handy mount for speeding between encounter zones, and it can be a hoverboard or a dragon; outfits come in sets that confer bonuses, but they can be anything from space adventurer to viking warrior, and there’s nothing to stop you mixing and matching them.
The unashamed zaniness of it all is a prevalent theme, and there’s little rhyme or reason to missions either. After selecting one from the unimaginatively named “Time Map”, you’re dropped in with three others and the objective is to destroy as many enemies as possible before you’re spat back to the Hub. If you can get a boss to spawn and beat them, the loot rewards are great.
While you can go off on your own if you really want to, a tether system rewards staying together and working as a team. You’ll do more damage and heal up if you stay within close proximity to one another, while running off alone is a recipe for disaster when you inevitably get surrounded and overwhelmed by the enemy. It never feels overly hard or stressful, though, even if you do try to go it alone. Enemies will beat you down through sheer numbers in the end. I wouldn’t recommend playing solo anyway: it’s possible if you want to do it, but you can’t pause the game, and it’s simply less fun alone.
There’s a variety of time periods to blast through, such as Medieval or the post-apocalyptic Wasteland, and maps are bright and colourful, though shrouded by something called the Tangle when you first arrive. This Fog of War-style cloak prevents you seeing everything on the map until you uncover it, promoting exploration and progression. Out of Time showers you with XP and loot, including crafting materials that you’ll use to upgrade your weapons and armour when you return to Infinitopia.
As you plough through each map you’ll come across wibbly-wobbly swirly things that are like time vortices, and signify a random event. Sometimes this is a miniboss or an enemy ambush, and will usually reward you with something cool like a doomsday bomb to clear the screen, or a boost of XP. Occasionally you’ll find larger vortices that present steeper challenges like defending a time capsule from hordes of enemies. These take various forms, such as each player standing on a pressure plate until a meter fills. None of it is anything particularly new, but the random nature of it all makes it feel somewhat fresh.
Ultimately your goal is to increase your Power Level, which you do by equipping and upgrading gear, or increasing your Mastery levels using gold found in missions. Gear is the easiest and most direct way, but you’ll soon need to find rarer and rarer gear to make much of a difference to your prowess.
Because every mission has a ticking clock and there’s so much going on, runs feel incredibly eventful and instantly addictive. The action feels fun, progression happens fast, and you’ll rarely return from a foray without something new to equip or play with, or at least without materials or currency to unlock or upgrade something new.
It’s hard to predict the trajectory of titles like Out of Time in a world where live service games are so hit-and-miss in terms of quality and longevity, but while it seems unlikely that Out of Time will hit Fortnite-levels of popularity, there is something refreshingly simple and innately likeable about a game that simply requires you to grind for grinding’s sake. There’s nothing pretentious about any of it, and if you want a game you can jump into for an hour at a time and feel like you had fun and made progress, there are worse options out there.
