Stargate: Timekeepers PC Review
Summary: A not totally unenjoyable entry into the Stargate universe, but one that didn’t make the most of its potential.
3
Disappointing
For the first time in nearly 14 years, an official Stargate game has finally been released for something other than mobile platforms. Developed by Slitherine, an established UK studio and publisher most notable for strategy titles, Stargate: Timekeepers continues this trend, with immediate comparisons able to be drawn to the classic real-time tactics game, ‘Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines’.
The campaign sees your new group of specialists fighting behind enemy lines in order to disrupt and hopefully defeat the Gau’uld. Like in Commandos, stealth is very much the order of the day here. Your team can’t take much damage before being out of action and are often under-equipped to go head-to-head with the enemy anyway, so it’s often a necessity rather than a choice.
Each character has a unique set of abilities that must be utilised in order to complete their mission, everything from distracting foes to using drones and sniping distant threats. A tactical mode is present that allows for time to be frozen and a series of actions to be queued up and executed, it even allows for them to be synchronized so that actions go off when they’re supposed to rather than on a first-come first-served basis. It’s a really nice touch and a feature that I made extensive use of.
Unfortunately, the problem with all of this, is that there’s often only one solution to a specific challenge that the game throws at you. Timekeepers often feels like a puzzle game rather than a strategy game. Sure, you might have a couple of different ways of distracting an enemy, but usually only one is actually viable if you want to progress without taking damage or wasting resources. This combined with quick save and load prompts being on screen at all times, along with a timer showing when you last saved makes the game feel like it encourages save scumming to get through it optimally. It can all feel very trial and error.
The enemy AI is simple, typically they either sit in one place, often in conversation with one another, or roam around on set patrol routes. This isn’t an issue per se, however, if a pair of enemies are incapacitated and not restrained, once they recover both continue on as though nothing had happened. It can be quite jarring and reduces the impact of making a mistake like forgetting to restrain an enemy.
Missions themselves play out like an episode of the TV show with a quick recap of what went on before. They take place on surprisingly large maps, though these are linear for the most part, just being a series of well-disguised corridors. Some objectives can be tackled from a few different angles, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Strangely, only half of the campaign, sorry ‘season’ is available from launch, with the second half being released later in the year. The game isn’t in early access and it’s not DLC, so it’s a bit of an odd choice that raised an eyebrow.
Graphically, Stargate: Timekeepers isn’t bad. Most of the models and textures are low quality, but taking place from a top-down perspective and not being able to zoom in too close to everything diminishes this somewhat and everything looks fine. It doesn’t stand out in any way, but simultaneously there’s not much to complain about in this respect either. There’s a decent array of options to customise how it looks and it ran flawlessly on my system. The audio is much the same, sound effects are faithful to the source material and there isn’t much to complain about, but nothing stands out as being exceptional either.
Final Thoughts?
For all the faults that I’ve outlined above, the gameplay itself is adequate, unrefined, and needing polish, but adequate, nonetheless. Where it fell down most for me was in the story. The Stargate universe is full of potential, an almost limitless number of worlds all full of storytelling possibilities, so for that potential to not be realised, is disappointing.
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