Time Walker: Dark World bills itself as a “roguelike auto-battler with strategic combat.” I’d say that’s accurate. Your have four heroes who you are free to modify how you see fit. You have a melee focused mage or a healing archer. The choice is largely yours. You start off by picking 4 base classes which you can upgrade your units into. You can also pick a contract, which effects the amount of soul tokens you get. You go through seventeen stages in a single world(the number of worlds depends on the difficulty level). You have normal stages of enemies. Elite stages have more powerful enemies. Treasure stages just give you skills. Stage 16/17 in a world is always a shop, where you can buy skills. Following that is always a boss battle.
At the end of every stage in Time Walker, you get one of 40 skills. These can range from healing to defense modifiers, to fire bolts. Any skill can be equipped on any character. You can also merge a few of the same skill with the same level(1,2,3) to make a more powerful skill. Three level ones turns into Level two. Three level twos turns into level three. Then two level threes turn into an ultra powerful EX skill. Now at the end of every run you get soul tokens. These can be used to buy upgrades in a series of panels. Buying the requisite number of upgrades unlocks the next panel. Most upgrades center around new classes and modifying those classes.
I liked Time Walker, but wouldn’t give it a Must Play due to disappointing technical issues, like a crash at one point. Also, there are things like, one time I put taunt on a character and enemies targeted everyone else except the one with taunt. A little more QA and polish would go a long way to solidifying the title. But still I give this a very solid Recommended with an eight back-end score. There is tons of strategic depth in Time Walker and plenty of things I did not go into. The complexity draws you in and simply won’t let you go. Get grinding those soul tokens!
Overall: Time Walker: Dark World need just a little more polish, but as it stands, its an excellent auto-battler with tons of depth.
Verdict: Recommended
| Release Date | 11/21/24 |
| Cost | $6.99 |
| Publisher | 2P Games |
| ESRB Rating | E |
P.S. Try Army of Ruin!
