Time Bandit – Part 1: Appendages of the Machine
A Game That Takes Time
A dark life sim that unfolds slowly in real time, with an unusual combination of elements from idle, stealth, and puzzle genres.
Make your choices carefully, because everything you start will take time to finish–just like in real life. Place down one of these automated forklifts to push a box for you, for example, and it’ll take an actual half an hour to finish moving it:
You’ll just have to go and do other stuff and come back later.
You work as an independent contractor for a mining company, but soon you discover they’re trying to take control of time in order to make you work for them forever. Manage your money, fuel, and energy while slowly solving puzzles to collect the time crystals and then pull off high-stakes stealthy heists to steal back from your employer.
Featuring tons of real-time game mechanics:
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Move boxes, grow trees, build bridges, and compact trash–and wait for them to finish.
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Different guard rotations and different consequences for getting caught depending on the time of day when you play.
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A story that unfolds slowly through conversations that work like real-life phone calls. Characters will only call you periodically to advance the story over the course of days and weeks of playtime.
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Your energy meter goes down while you play, and it takes up to 8 real-time hours of good sleep to fill it up all the way.
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Meet characters at the actual meeting times that you set with them.
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Real-time dynamic music.
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And much more.
A Story of Political Intrigue
The first part of an epic, explicitly anticapitalist melodrama, told through lowpoly cutscenes and radio conversations inspired by early cinematic games. The company’s CEO and shareholders have come up with a scheme to live forever, but it will mean sacrificing the lives of their workers. Fight for a world where everyone has a right to their time.
Use the realistic radio to call characters anytime for dialogue about whatever situation you’re in. You’ll find hints on what to do next, details that expand the story, fourth wall–breaking humor, and more.
A challenge with real consequences: Don’t get caught by guards or let yourself fall asleep, or you might end up stuck waiting it out in jail or the hospital.
Fixed camera angles in gameplay, just like in the old days. With a real-time day-and-night cycle and real-time weather tied to your location, to make the game integrate more with your life.
Tons of playtime in part one alone. And you can use your save file to continue where you left off when the next part comes out. Truly commit to the long haul of the real-time experience.
Join Time Bandit’s Discord to receive development updates and offer your feedback on work in progress! https://discord.gg/vhue5NtN39
Read More: Best Real-Time Narrative Games.
Cyber Ops
This game is great and I’m kinda sad it got so many bad reviews. It’s challenging but honestly it’s not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. Once you figure out the mechanics it’s challenging but perfectly feasible after a couple of tries. It had some bugs at launch but they have all been fixed already.
Great atmosphere, good voice acting, nice looking interface and very singular gameplay. Being the guardian angel hacker behind a screen while the operators actually do the work might not be for everyone but I personally love it.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time Atmospheric Games.
Every negative review is sadly 100 % correct. Only 25 % ever made 1st mission. Only 0,3 % players ever finished the game and 1 % just hacked the “game finished " achievement, because more players finished game than finished last mission. You will be fighting the logic breaking UI problems more than “triangle” enemies. All moving enemies are called “turrets” when killed. You don’t know at this moment if cyborg or human enemy type died.
You will NOT be able to win after level 5 without good oldschool health cheats. The game is so buggy that some mechanics needed for victory don’t works sometimes. I won spider-tank level 6 fight legit first, but squad just glitched at the door when leving the cathedral. QTE skillchecks are also broken or start at unwinnable state.
– Real player with 23.1 hrs in game
Gray Zone
“Dangerous is fun” - and so is this game :) I’ve played several hours and had a lot of fun. I like the gameplay, the characters (especially ‘Breg’), the setting and the story (so far)… Graphics and sound are very good, voice acting is great and adds to the atmoshpere and the game mechanics offer a lot of variety. What to do? = Sneaking or gun blazing? Go around enemies or better confront them? Push forward or solve the small riddles (which have been carefully fitted into the game world)? Great work so far on the game aspects as well as on QA - I haven’t encountered serious bugs so far, saving and loading is working fine. Problems are small, like the main character does not respond after loading a savegame, but that could be solved by restarting the missioon and then loading the savegame again…
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time Strategy Games.
UPDATED** I can no longer recommend
Overall a unique RTS that has a fun storyline. There’s still some bugs, and the game is like a rollercoaster. It’s fun and exciting but seems to be over all too soon. I’d recommend anyone who enjoys RTS’s and wants something different to check this game out!
**The game feels abandoned. The last update from the devs was to finish the last two missions of chapter one and devote all of December to it. Since then? Nothing……
– Real player with 7.7 hrs in game
Satellite Reign
### Summary
Free roam squad based RTS/RPG with a cyberpunk setting running in the classical veins of Syndicate. Start from the ground up with a weak squad and limited supplies, and slowly work your way up the food chain to take on the big corporations. Acquire a mass of guns and upgrades to help you accomplish your goals. Decide whether you want to use stealth, sheer firepower or a mix of both to complete your objectives and rise to the top.
Plays a lot like Dawn of War II with a Blade Runner theme whilst being fresh and unique. Highly recommended!
– Real player with 74.2 hrs in game
EDIT -
CO-OP MULTIPLAYER!!!! Game was ok-good before. now it is AWESOME!
===========================
Looking for a sequel to Syndicate Wars?
Unsure whether this is for you?
It’s a very tough call.
A bullet-point comparative breakdown.
Satellite Reign is the best revival yet seen of its predecessor. At about 30hrs in to the final release I am enjoying it, despite it leaving me wanting. Aside from this game’s amazing visuals - which are indeed damn near perfect, the biggest differences between this game and Syndicate are in its comprisal of main gameplay mechanics.
– Real player with 72.8 hrs in game
Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
Entertaining. This is a tactics game in the likes of Commandos. The graphics are old but still nice. Decent soundtrack. The story is good.
No bugs but some freezes and some crashes, really not a big deal. Runs fine on Win 7.
Well, this is a classic now. It’s a good game with a lot of content. Many hours to finish it. There are several ways to approach a mission and characters with diverse abilities to help you in your quests. This game is an elaborated puzzle, basically. Unlike Commandos, solving some of the scenarios requires thinking outside the box, which is not necessarily an awesome thing. You can experience some frustration time when the abilities don’t work as they should, like enemies refusing to investigate a noise or pick up something. The game breaks its own features and mechanics to create hard head-scratchers with weird solutions. In some cases, It will be both surprising and dumb to find out that you need to be a happy-trigger and not a puzzle solver. If it gets too frustrating, just look for a walkthrough.
– Real player with 74.5 hrs in game
Many people have reviewed this game with an eye on compatibility issues - these are obviously important, and it’s sad that a game can be sold on a platform like this in an essentially non-functional state. But I feel there needs to be a bit more said about the game itself.
Desperados, as a real-time tactical strategy top-down stealth game (genres are confusing), falls into sparsely-traversed terrain. You command a posse of ridiculously stereotypical western caricatures as they make their way through a ripper of an old-school western.The backdrops of each map are frequently beautiful, the voice acting is impressively involved, and the gameplay is involving. But it is the latter that makes Desperados stand out.
– Real player with 34.9 hrs in game
Cyber Ops Prologue
I really enjoyed it up to the cyborgs… tried and tried and tried again to beat it.
Its not clear how to disable them and seems totally random, I loose a squad member every time I attack then once they are disabled and hacked they still keep coming. You have to keep glitching them every 20 seconds or so to stop them which is really annoying. Once hacked they also come straight for you every time they wake up which would be ok when theres only 1 but 3 of em… too much. I cant tell if it was meant to be this hard for the demo so you cant finish it. Up to that point it was fairly easy and had a well paced tutorial.
– Real player with 5.8 hrs in game
Huh, neat game.
I think the tutorial is a little confusing. Maybe doing the tutorial in a Special Ops Training Area is a better idea. In this game am trying to learn but I have cyborg soldiers and turrets firing at me. It is a little too much pressure lol.
It took me a while to understand how the tracing worked, but when I got the hang of it (keeping the levels 1 2 an 3 retention windows open and hacking the shit out of everything), I felt pretty cool.
The only “bug” I found was while my team was facing a console, they wouldn’t return fire at a soldier shooting them from the door, even in Aggressive Stance.
– Real player with 5.3 hrs in game
ROMBIE
I’ve been playing phr00t’s games since 3079 (great game in its own right!) and I think this is the best combination of the exploration, kill, loot, upgrade cycle which characterize his rpg-type games.
The loot/repair upgrade system in this game is addicting and definitely doesn’t dole out the good drops like before making the rewards and choices more meaningful. The environment is more streamlined and part of the gameplay, I always felt cover was just a dive or dash away and maintaining jet energy has real consequences with the acid river always below. The shooting feels nice and the new combat mechanic of hitting critical areas on enemies makes even the toughest ROMBIES victim to a carefully planned shot! I really like the cryptocoin economy even though it hasn’t worked out for me yet, it’s awesome making investments and hoping they come through! The standard credits economy is also very well balanced and there are always things to buy as having a surplus of money means you can move faster between areas. The story and writing in general are quite barebones and not as engaging to me as in 5089 but I do like how this game has a few set pieces and story parts. The sound is a step up from previous titles and the soundtrack is great as always.
– Real player with 62.7 hrs in game
A phr00t FPS where you can be a head-sniping ninja robot frankenstein who jetpacks across a long series of bleak abstract floating islands filled with infinitely re-spawning modular machines which you harvest for upgrades by leading them into quiet corners and shooting them in the head with projectile-based (not hitscan) self-recharging energy weapons.
@erradical:
Robot mugging simulator.
Accurate.
ROMBIE is a ‘real’ shooter, in the sense that aim is a huge part of combat. All the guns shoot slow-moving projectiles which force you to lead your targets a lot more than in your typical “modern” Battlefield-style shooter, and enemies in the game will be far more reliable at shooting you than you, them (which is why you gotta get up close). ROMBIE starts out tough and continues to be dangerous throughout. You’ll be doing a lot of shooting and fleeing (..or cloaking).
– Real player with 39.1 hrs in game
Tunnels of Despair
There are dozens of “small indie walk around in the dark jump scare” games out there and most of them are garbage. Tunnels of Despair does it right. The atmosphere is creepy, the graphics are solid, the music is eerie, and the tension is real - exactly what you want from this kind of game.
The core gameplay is avoiding shambling undead while trying to find the clues and objects you need to escape from an abandoned subway station. A simple premise, but one that works well. After a few horrible deaths you’ll start to think that you have things figured out. Then, the situation gets worse and you go back to being afraid and dying. By the time you finally make it to one of the two exits, you will heave a genuine sigh of relief.
– Real player with 9.5 hrs in game
The idea is nice, but the realization is utter crap. Bugged controls, when you can hit the zombie 30% of time, and sometimes the crowbar simply lags. And that fucking “random” items placement. The developer must stop being an asshole and place the crowbar in one exact spot, or remove it for good. And unkillable enemies which can spot you from a mile distance even without a flashlight or noise. Come on, man, don’t make that “game” even more miserable.
If you bought those horse apples, better return it fast.
– Real player with 9.4 hrs in game
The Tower
You’ve never had a day quite like this before…
It’s your first day as a security guard for one of the most secure buildings in the city. But your first day becomes your worst day when an explosion rocks the building, blocking stairwells and disabling elevators. It’s now up to you and the remaining guards that are still alive to push back and find out who’s behind all of this.
The Tower is an action-packed first-person shooter created by a single developer. It mixes tense combat, challenging puzzles, and a constantly unfolding story.
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High-octane gunplay against a brutal and relentless paramilitary – only you stand in their way.
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Fight, sneak, and defend yourself in a nail-biting struggle for survival.
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Orient around crumbling, hand-crafted environments. Move through vents, take your enemies by surprise, and use any advantage you can find.
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Story-rich action gameplay that reveals an intriguing conspiracy at the heart of the attack.
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Join forces with an interesting cast of allies and resist the attack alongside them. Work together and you might just stand a chance.