As I’ve mentioned in my reviews of the Power Rangers games
for the SNES and Genesis, they were HUGE when I was a kid. However, I grew out
of rather quickly when Power Rangers Turbo came around. It’s hard to say
exactly what caused my loss of interest; maybe I had grown too old for it,
maybe I moved to something else (Pokemon most likely), or maybe it’s just that
TURBO SUCKED. Without teenage me knowing it, the Power Rangers were still going
on even as of today. Let’s take a look at a game from a Power Rangers series
that I missed: here’s Power Rangers Time Force for the Sony PlayStation.
As previously mentioned, I haven’t watched this series
during its original run, nor have I have I watched it since. However, I have
seen Linkara’s synopsis of it in History of the Power Rangers (and it does
sound like a really good series). What struck me as odd was when I heard the Rangers
were trapped in 2001. This is certainly not the case in the game, as you are
time hoping. You play more the role of “time police” in this game, chasing
after time travelling criminals. It’s not a BAD idea at all and I’m pretty sure
it has been done before, but the way that it’s pulled off here isn’t even done well:
they pretty much tell you what a bad guy is doing when, and you go stop him.
Along with some of the obvious tasks you need to do in the stages, it kills the
immersion and makes you really aware you are playing a video game.
The graphics in this game aren’t too bad for the time, but
the character models are very jagged and polygonal. This isn’t unforgivable for
the PS1, but what makes it worse is that the Rangers all have the same shape
with a different skin on them (with the exception of the pink one). This isn’t
helped with the kind of ridiculous martial arts animations that don’t always
seem to connect the way it should. But while the graphics faults could be
overlook cause “it’s on the PS1”, I don’t think that excuses the poor audio. The
music is pretty generic, and I don’t if my disk is just scratched in a weird
way, but it would stop randomly (though in some videos I’ve seen, I does sounds
like the music fades before starting a loop over). And while Power Rangers
isn’t remembers for the acting, the voices are pretty corny here, especially
with the stuff you hear over and over, like when a ranger gets hurt.
So far, everything I’ve discussed are things that can easily
be over looked if the game play was great. However, this game sucks all around,
and it only takes one level to see that. The first thing you’ll be informed of
is that there is a time limit on each stage (because time travel?) and by
collecting hourglasses, you can pause the timer (reminding me of NES Back to
the Future). You might panic to finish a level quickly, but they don’t tell you
it’s just for a bonus. The next thing that happens is that you’ll try to move
and notice that it’s very stiff. Your Ranger seems to have a hard time moving diagonally
(even with an analog controller) and any movement means taking off in a rush.
Then, you’ll likely try jumping, but the jump button is rapid fire. If you h old
the jump button to get maximum distance, you might jump again upon landing. And
finally there’s fighting. Due to poor hit detections and the weird animations I
mentioned already, you might suddenly fall to the ground or just swing wildly
at nothing. There’s no flow and it seems the best way to win is by being cheap
with running kicks. This especially makes the bosses annoying since you also
need to fight them in the Time Force Megazord (sorry, but this game makes me
not care about the proper name). The problem is it doesn’t control differently,
so it feels like you’re doing the same tedious fight twice.
Power Rangers Time Force is not a good game in
anyway… but unlike previous bad games, it’s hard for me to be upset by this.
First off, I didn’t watch the series before playing the game, so I had nothing
to hold it up to. Secondly, I was kind of expecting it to be bad considering it
was this licensed game on the PlayStation. It feels like developers Climax
Studios and publishers THQ didn’t even put any effort in this and made a game
based on just hearing the name and theme song, so why would I put more emotion
into it? The one positive I can say about the game is that it’s irritating, but
not frustrating (like a fly buzzing around your apartment). You can finish this
and probably won’t break your controller. I give Power Rangers Time Force for
the PlayStation 3 levels out of 10.
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