Out of Time review — Grinding for fun

I’ve played a lot of rogue-likes and rogue-lites, and I’ve seen them mixed with just about every genre–deck builders, souls-likes, shooters, and so on. What I haven’t seen much of, however, are multiplayer rogues. Cue Out of Time, a multiplayer action-rogue-lite with an emphasis on looting. Sounds like a recipe to fry my dopamine production. Let's jump into the review.

Right off the bat, you're given a pool of 12 pre-made character body-types to choose from. Though, you can add little touches like different hair, skin, and eye styles. What you do here doesn’t matter too much, as you can always change it later. After creating our character, we’re given a taste of the story. The sky broke in an event called “The Shattering,” which ironically has brought people together... for survival. Everything has been thrown into chaos, and time is behaving strangely. We’re plopped down into an otherworldly cityscape. Tendrils reach into the sky where floating islands hover. It’s a rather well-done set piece. Slightly down what's left of the road, we meet Jeanne D’Arc, a woman in ornate armor who calls us over. She tells us the gravity of the situation, gives us a weapon, and instructs us to book it out of there. Soon after, we’re ambushed by a mob of little creatures, who we fend off with our axe, which auto-attacks. This is very much in the same vein as other horde-survival rogue-likes–think Vampire Survivors. As we fend off waves of enemies, we start getting new equipment, which comes with different powers, like the ability to throw our axe, smash the ground to raise spikes, and send forth a wall of soldiers. Gear is king in Out of Time, as everything from your abilities to your stats revolves around what you’re wearing and wielding.

The themes of the tutorial enemies seem to have no rhyme or reason; it’s a grab bag of random animals, monsters, and combinations of the two. That’s not to say they’re not quality designs, and I would argue the randomness of the enemies on display matches the chaos of the end times theme the game has going on. Anyways, after fighting through more waves of baddies and getting some more gear, which grants us new abilities, we face off against the final boss. It’s a giant bear that does giant bear things. It’s not difficult to win if you’re paying attention to the well telegraphed attacks, but if you’re sloppy, then it will maul you.

After felling the boss, we’re transported to the game’s main hub area, Infinitopia. It’s a chill hangout spot with surreal visuals and lovable lo-fi background music. I’d specify the aesthetic, but it’s a hodgepodge of various architectural styles, visual styles, and cultures, all merged into a fractured plane. The visuals themselves lean into a cartoony style along the lines of Fortnite and The Darwin Project. We meet up with Jeanne once more, and she instructs us to the center of the hub. It’s here where we find the Time Map, which serves as the mission select.

The world map we’re given spans various eras in time and adds context to the random amalgamation of enemies we fought in the tutorial, who all belong in their respective time periods. There are six eras to play in, but only three were available to me during my play time, which include the Medieval, Modern, and Wasteland biomes. Each era has four mission areas to play in, which have different resources and loot pools. An Era also has overarching rewards for completing missions on higher and higher difficulties. Basically, no matter what you do, you’ll be rewarded for your grinding, but if you’re looking for something specific, then you’ll have to go somewhere specific. You can typically expect weapons and gear to be in their appropriate era, like swords, axes, and staves in the medieval era, missile launchers and guns in the modern era, and drones and gas masks in the wasteland era.

As for the gameplay itself, players start in a circular safe zone. When ready, players will press a button, which lowers the walls and starts a timer. Within the given timeframe, the player, alone or with a team of up to four, needs to press forward through a mostly linear map, unveiling a fog of war called “The Tangle” as they go. After enough of the map is revealed–about 75% on the base difficulty–the boss will spawn, and your team has to take it down. On your way to discover more of the map, you’ll face down hordes of enemies, who drop XP on death, which grants you levels. After gaining a few levels, players get to pick an in-run upgrade to boost their stats and abilities. Upgrades often affect your whole team, so groups must keep the broader picture in mind. There are also resources to collect, like gold coins, metals, wood, gems, and textiles, which are used to level up your weapons back at Infinitopia—we’ll dive deeper into that later.

Right off the bat, a few things set Out of Time apart from other roguelikes. Obviously, there’s the multiplayer aspect, but then there are the more subtle design choices like a linear map flow and boss spawns based on how much you’ve explored. Most important of all is the Tether System, which encourages cooperation between teammates. Everyone on your team has an aura radius in a big circle around them, and if all teammates are within it, then they’ll be buffed. Anyone who steps away from their team’s aura radius will take damage over time. This system places a heavy emphasis on teamwork, so if you were hoping to do your own thing, then you’ll have to adapt your mindset. Alternatively, players can choose to run missions solo, which completely negates the damage over time effect. One frustrating aspect of playing solo is that there’s no pause button and no team to protect you if you need to go AFK for a second, turning even a minor distraction IRL into a game over. Even with a team, you still need to beat the clock. A pause menu would be a little feature, but it would go a long way in terms of quality of life.

Scattered throughout the map are spikey red and purple vortexes, which come in two sizes, small and large. The small vortexes usually trigger a random event like ambushes and mini-bosses, or spawn some sort of temporary power-up or bonus. You might find a bomb that heavily damages all nearby enemies, invulnerability shields, speed and damage boosts, and a magnet that attracts all of the XP tokens and resources you’ve left on the ground. These power-ups can also drop from dead enemies, though that’s relatively rare unless you have a piece of equipment to boost their spawn rates. The stat-based and buff upgrades are nice finds, as they last a while and can help your group make a strong push, but I question the usefulness of the bombs and magnets. You can’t rely on them spawning, so you’ll kill all enemies and pick up all resources along the way. By the time you get to one, their usefulness is moot. In my experience, the bomb could spawn in the midst of combat and be a big help, but oftentimes it appeared at the end of the battle to finish off a few stragglers. The magnet was almost always next to useless. I feel like these problems could be fixed by allowing the player to carry the bomb for a short time and store the magnet for later use.

Then there are the larger vortexes, which trigger a time capsule challenge. These will ask you to defend a time capsule for a certain amount of time, or against a certain number of enemies. Maybe you’ll need to stand in place on a pressure plate until a meter fills or collect a bunch of mechanical parts lying around. My first death was from getting too cocky against a herd of raccoons in the Farmlands zone while I was trying to complete a pressure plate time challenge, and I thought I could tank their grabby little paws. Regardless, if you complete the challenge, you’ll be rewarded with a free ability upgrade, which is game-changing on higher difficulties.

Remember, throughout your gameplay, the timer is ticking down, so you might not be able to engage with every possible reward. If the timer ticks to zero, you lose. There’s no fancy animation; you just get a defeat screen. While the timer ticks down, a difficulty modifier is ticking up, piling on even more pressure. The only way to pause the timer is to trigger the boss spawn by hitting the exploration threshold. Adds don’t seem very common during boss fights, so it’s mostly a 1v1 or team battle that you can take your time with. The bosses themselves are pretty easy on the first difficulty. For the modern era, there’s the bear you fought in the tutorial, there’s a robot that creates constructs to help fight you, and there’s a big frost bird. The bird is the only one that’s really threatening, but that was mostly due to odd telegraphing. Its attacks are all AOE frost and wind-based, the borders of which aren’t very easy to see with its light blue aesthetic. I was also playing on a difficulty substantially above my power level, which is calculated by the quality of your gear and the stats you’ve accumulated.

After you’ve beaten the boss, you’re given a random piece of gear from the zone’s loot pool. If you’re playing in a group, then you’ll have more reward options to choose from, incentivizing queuing up with others. Playing on higher level difficulties increases your odds of getting rarer loot, with rarity levels including: common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. Keep in mind, you have to defeat every boss in an era on your current difficulty level to move on to the next. There are normal, hard, and then shattered levels one through ten. The higher you crank the difficulty, the higher the bonus resources multiplier goes. Then, you’re sent back to Infinitopia, where you can upgrade your gear and buy character upgrades to boost stats and resource gathering more directly. Anything you buy or upgrade in the stats and gear section will increase your power level. The way power level and difficulty interact was a bit of a sore spot, as I was playing with two different crews. The base difficulty of normal was mind-numbingly easy, as my power level exceeded the recommended level, but the next difficulty up was brutally hard for the lower power level players I was with. The game also scales challenges to the number of players, so even my higher power level was getting overwhelmed.

Players have two main ways of increasing their power level: gear and mastery stats. Let's start with gear, as it’s pretty much the core of your character, from abilities to overall stats. As previously mentioned, each piece of gear comes with its own power level and abilities, as well as its own stats. These usually fall into one of three categories: tank, support, and damage, and there’s a helpful little triangle graph in your inventory to help you visualize which direction your build leans. Regardless of archetype, you can level up your gear with resources you’ve found during runs, plus some gold, with the price increasing after each upgrade. Though the real jumps in power level come from finding items of higher rarity. I started the game with a common item called Roscoe’s Beret and put a lot of resources into buffing it to level 10. I later found a rare variant of the same item, and swapping them out increased my power level by about 500. Leveling it up increased my power level by about 40 per level. Keep in mind, though, that higher rarity items need higher rarity resources for upgrade crafting. You can transmute a lower rarity resource to a higher rarity with gold, but it gets pricey. The exchange rate is ten to one, so having 10,000 of a common resource will only grant you about 100 of a rare one, as it’s third in line in the rarity ranks. If your gear hits the max level, then you can spend a special resource you get from scrapping items, called Time in a Bottle, to increase the item’s mastery and raise the level cap by 10. Scrapping an item you’ve invested a lot in will yield more resources than an unupgraded one of the same rarity. As you can probably tell, this system is incredibly grindy, but that’s where mastery upgrades come in.

The other way to increase your power level is by purchasing mastery upgrades, which increase your baseline stats at the cost of gold. These will increase your power level by about ten per. There are also mastery upgrades that increase the amount of a resource you get from harvesting specific materials, aiding in your fight against the grind. All of the masteries have multiple levels, with the cost jumping each time you buy them.

To simplify, the typical gameplay loop is: run a mission, gather resources and gear, upgrade your gear, then run higher-level missions to repeat the cycle. That brings up a tough question: Is the gameplay compelling enough to fuel the grind? I would say yes, but this game has some rough edges. There were a few notable bugs, like enemies getting stuck on terrain or hovering in place, every collectable required for a time capsule challenge spawning next to each other, or ranged attacks targeting enemies but flying past them if you’re too close. Every enemy of the same type will crumple over and die in the same animation, and it’s hard to tell what’s living or dead when dozens of them are menacingly walking towards you. The modern era has just about every stereotypical forest creature you could imagine, like raccoons, snakes, rats, foxes, owls, and also black panthers (for some reason). I guess they're evil animals, as their eyes faintly glow red, but for the most part, it just looks like you're obliterating Bambi's finest in massive numbers.

On the other hand, the abilities your gear grants you are quite cool, and I love the diversity of gear that comes naturally from having a setting split across eras. Having someone in your party calling down an airstrike while another charges forward to deliver fatal blows with an axe is awesome. A lot of the attacks are well animated, providing a feeling of impact, even if the enemies receiving the hits don’t do a great job of showing it (devs, please add ragdoll physics). You’ll definitely find a playstyle that you enjoy, even if it takes A LOT of grinding for the right gear.

I feel like there could be some more guaranteed ways to get weapons and armor, so you can play with the abilities you want without having to rely on RNG. The most interesting part of the game is playing around with new builds and grinding to upgrade your gear. It’s a shame that you might see a weapon you like, but just can’t seem to get it. Then, when you finally do, it might be a lower rarity than your current weapon, making it obsolete from the start. Adding some sort of mercy system where you select the weapon you want to grind for would not only add more purpose to the grinding, but it would also add impact to climbing difficulty levels for a better shot at a higher rarity.

Overall, I quite enjoyed my time with Out of Time. I often found myself driven to keep grinding by the cool weapons and gear, but the random jank and repetitive enemies did make me wince more than once. They have a compelling base game and quite a bit of content, so I’m excited to see what it looks like once they sand down the rough edges and iron out the wrinkles.