Review | Review: Time Crash is a decent endless-running game for mobile
Very reminiscent of the console game Mirror’s Edge, Time Crash also has you race through urban environments under the clock
Time Crash
8SEC
3 stars
Time Crash (available for iOS) strongly reminds me the hit game Mirror’s Edge, reappropriated for mobile devices. For those who never played the original, it was a thrilling endless-running game in which you scaled walls, ceilings and other hard-to-reach surfaces through parkour-like moves.
Time Crash does a decent job of replicating all that, moving ME’s third-person perspective to the first-person, and toning down its control scheme to a one-fingered set of taps and swipes.
Surprisingly, the game works well given the context. It’s broken down into a set of levels, each lasting about a minute or so, with a set of clearly marked obstacles giving you less and less time to avoid and evade.
Levels are always changing though, so dying means you’re dropped back into the beginning of your run, with a slightly different layout this time round. And while that sounds slightly challenging, it can also be a bit confusing, with a couple of glitches causing you to run into random blocks or get stuck in an ever-revolving loop.
The aesthetic here is a quick 60 frames per second and it’s appealing in a ’90s-futuristic kind of way, and its Lawnmower Man VR-inspired world makes everything feel slightly retro but also innovative. It’s a visual style that was once the norm but has been long forgotten, and given the constant movement of the gameplay, it does a decent job, if at times looking slightly tacky and underdeveloped.