You’ll need to manipulate time itself

At its most basic, Super Time Force is a side-scrolling run-and-gun shooter, like the Contra and Metal Slug games you used to play on your SNES and in the arcades. The core gameplay is familiar: you run from left to right blowing away bad guys, and each member of your team has different skills. One has shots that bounce off the walls, for instance, while another has a shield to deflect bullets back at bad guys. There's also a skateboarding dinosaur who can chomp down on foes at close range. On their own, none of these characters have the capability to complete a level on their own — so you’ll need to manipulate time itself.

In each level you have a limited number of rewinds at your disposal, which let you literally reverse time as far back as you like. So if you die, you can rewind a few seconds earlier, and start playing as a new character, while the ghost version that just died runs alongside you. This ghost will behave just as it did when you controlled it. Maybe you drop in a shielded soldier to protect a previously doomed character from enemy fire, or maybe you switch to a character with a grenade launcher so you can increase the firepower you're putting into the giant robot charging your way.

Things get crazy since you can do this multiple times: it's possible to have many little ghosts running around the screen at the same time, firing their weapons and helping you proceed through the level. This isn't just a way to create insanely chaotic scenes though — it's a vital strategy for getting through the game, and offers a terrific playground for experimenting with new strategies.

Take boss battles, for instance. Like many similar 2D games, STF features massive bosses with constantly shifting weak points that need to be exploited. My solution in most cases was to carefully position characters around the boss, so that I was attacking these vulnerable points simultaneously — this took a great deal of trial and error, as I’d often let characters be killed in order to find those weaknesses. Other times I’d be up against an insanely powerful enemy and I’d simply use brute force: constantly rewind just a second or two earlier, add a new character, start firing like crazy, rinse and repeat.