Super Time Force gives you 30 lives and then asks you to spend them on purpose. Capybara Games built a side-scrolling shooter where dying is not a failure state but a resource, and the rewind button is the best weapon in the game. It came out on Xbox 360 and Xbox One on May 14, 2014, and it still plays like nothing else from that year.
Trailer, via IGN.
Commander Repeatski and the Time Out mechanic
The setup is simple. Commander Repeatski runs the Super Time Force, a time-traveling military outfit that leaps across the ages to set history right. The squad deploys from prehistoric times through the Middle Ages and into the far future, six stages in all, and the soldiers cause paradoxes without a second thought.
What matters is how you fight. When a character dies, or when you choose to end a run early, you rewind the timestream and drop back in at the point where that run began. Your new character then plays alongside a ghost version of the one who just died. Stack enough of these and a single screen fills with your own past selves, all firing at once.
That is the whole trick, and it is a good one. The game calls it Time Out. You are not just undoing a mistake; you are building a squad out of your own history. A level that looks impossible on the first pass becomes a matter of choreography once you understand that every corpse is a future ally.
The influences are not hidden. Capybara drew on side-scrolling shooters like Contra and Metal Slug, then handed the player control of time itself. The result is a bullet hell level that you can rewind, restage and solve at your own pace.
Rewind time and choose when to jump back into the action, teaming-up with your past selves in a unique single-player co-op experience!
Sixteen characters, six eras, one mess
Super Time Force fields more than 16 characters, each with a different weapon or power, spread across the six stages. The roster is deliberately eccentric. The tone is comedy as much as science fiction, and the game knows it.
The items keep the pressure moving. Cloxs reverse the time limit. Shards are violet, dust-like pixels that let you and the clock both move in slow motion, and they only show up if you use Time Out. Glorbs are yellow diamonds that add one life each, hidden in certain spots or inside enemies that are hard to kill. Collect enough shards and glorbs and you unlock another character.
That economy is tighter than it first appears. Lives are the currency, Time Out is the bank, and the glorbs are the interest. A player who hoards lives will stall. A player who spends them carelessly will run dry before the last era.
The single-player co-op framing is the sharpest idea here. You are cooperating with nobody but yourself, and the game makes that literal. There is no second player, no split screen, no online partner. Just you, your ghosts, and whatever you did thirty seconds ago.
What the time travel actually costs
The paradoxes are the joke, and the game never punishes you for them. The Force bends the timeline, replays its own runs and rewrites them, and nobody in the fiction seems troubled by it. That is a deliberate choice, and it keeps the tone light.
It also means the story stays thin. Repeatski sends the squad out to make the present a better place to live, and the game moves on to the next era. The six periods are backdrops for the mechanics rather than places with their own weight. Players looking for a narrative that comments on rewriting history will not find it here.
What they will find is a game that trusts its central mechanic completely. Every system feeds Time Out. The lives, the shards, the glorbs, the 16-character roster, the six stages — all of it exists to make you rewind and try again with more bodies on the field.
Super Time Force Ultra and the years after
Capybara did not leave the game where it landed. An updated version, Super Time Force Ultra, came to Xbox platforms and to Microsoft Windows through Steam and GOG.com on August 25, 2014. It reached PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on September 1, 2015.
That rollout matters when weighing the game now. The Xbox 360 and Xbox One release was the opening move, not the final form. Anyone picking up Super Time Force today is likely playing Ultra, and the additions are the reason the game kept circulating after its debut year.
The reception followed the same arc. Super Time Force drew critical acclaim and awards for its storytelling, its gameplay and its mechanics, and the praise centered on the same thing every time: the rewind. It is the rare hook that holds up under repetition instead of wearing out.
The verdict on Super Time Force
Ranking what Super Time Force gets right, in order of how much it matters:
- The Time Out rewind, which turns death into a tool and makes every level a puzzle you solve with your own corpses.
- The 16-character roster across six eras, which gives the mechanic enough variety to sustain a full run.
- The shard and glob economy, which ties slow motion and extra lives to the same rewind loop.
- The comedy and the paradoxes, which sell the premise without asking you to take it seriously.
The weak point is the plot, and it is a real one. Repeatski’s mission to improve the present is a premise, not a story, and the six time periods never become more than settings. The game is funny and inventive and it has almost nothing to say.
That trade is worth making. Super Time Force is a shooter that solved a problem most shooters never ask — what if dying were the point — and then built every other system around the answer. The 30 lives are not a cushion. They are the moves you have left.
The Xbox 360 and Xbox One versions remain the place the idea started, and the Ultra release is where most players will meet it. Either way, the rewind is the reason to play, and it earns the trip.
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