Retro game review: Time Lord (Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990)

Board game company Milton Bradley decided to get on the video game train during the NES era and published a handful of games before going back to board games a few years later. One of the few titles they published was Time Lord.

While my gut tells me this is probably going to be terrible, I learned that this game was developed by Rare, which gives me some hope. This game has sat unplayed on my shelf for years. Let's dust this thing off and see if its a hidden gem or a piece of garbage.

_{^{Image source: photo by retro-room}}

_{^{Image source: User NintendoComplete on YouTube}}

Time Lord begins with a flashy title screen, with powerful music and impressively animated 80’s blue electricity lighting up the logo. You play a soldier tasked with traveling through time to prevent an alien invasion of the earth. Invaders from the planet Drakkon have sent armies to to four different time periods to manipulate our history, so its up to you to travel back to these eras to set things right.

You begin the game in the fictional ‘present’ of 2999 and must collect 5 orbs in each level to travel to the next era on your list. The first stage is very brief, and serves as a training stage to teach you the controls and how to collect the orbs you need to progress.

Controls for the game are awkward, slippery and sluggish. Your soldier is hard to control accurately, which makes any sort of precision a chore. Sadly, this makes actually trying to fight enemies a bad idea and running by them whenever possible is a much better option.

The game uses a fake 3D perspective, like you find in beat-em-ups like Battletoads or “Double Dragon, which lets you move up and down on the gaming ‘plane’. This is interesting, but doesn’t really add anything to the experience and in some ways makes it worse. Your solider walks much faster at an up or down angle, which is required to make some jumps which makes those challenges a test of luck rather than one of skill.

_{^{Image source: User NintendoComplete on YouTube}}

As you progress through the levels, you’ll find a wide variety of enemies appropriate to each of the 5 time periods you find yourself in. From knights and dragons in the medieval stage to soldiers in the WWII level, there’s quite a bit of variety in the enemies. However, they don't seem to be Drakkon aliens. No, I'm mostly killing humans -- knights, cowboys, soldiers and pirates. I'm not sure how i feel about that, unless the Drakkon aliens are taking the form of humans.

The stages (future, medieval, pirate ship, wild west and WWII) themselves are fairly bland and repetitive. Scattered throughout the levels are minor powerups like health and point boosters and each stage has an era-appropriate weapon to find.

In each of the four time periods you travel back to, you’ll need to find the four orbs you need to complete the stage. Four are hidden around the levels, while the last one is held by the stage boss. The orbs are sometimes hidden in plain sight, other times they’re hidden until you trigger an event to make them appear. While I admire the concept, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what might make an orb appear. Duck into a section of the background, stand underneath a floating one to make it drop, and bouncing off an invisible platform are some of the ways to reach or reveal these hidden orbs.

The gameplay is bland, awkward and simply not fun. There are some interesting ideas here, but sadly they’re trapped inside a terrible game.

_{^{Image source: User NintendoComplete on YouTube}}

Let me be blunt…this is a butt-ugly game. Most of the sprites are very poorly drawn and animated. The backgrounds lack detail and the game has a hideous color scheme. No matter if you’re in the old west, a medieval kingdom, a pirate ship or in the trenches of WWII, everything is brown, blue and green. I’m not kidding, every stage is mostly composed of those three colors. The title screen really set me up for disappointment with this one, because the visuals that follow it are awful.

Thankfully, the sound is much better than the visuals. Sound effects are vibrant and well-done, while the music is nicely composed with each stage having an era-appropriate theme. From the Sergio Leone-inspired western theme to the medieval stage music that channels the tunes from Wizards and Warriors, the music here is quite good, if not a bit flat.

_{^{Image source: User NintendoComplete on YouTube}}

Time Lord is a disappointing game considering it was developed by Rare. The gameplay feels like a game that was released on a computer from the mid 80’s not a NES game that hit the console after amazing games like Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man II. There’s very little here to recommend, so this is simply a shelf-filler title. Pick it up if you’re a NES collector, otherwise just pass it up.

Current value:

Loose: $5.99 | Complete: $17.99

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

^{Cover Image Source: Nintendology}