Much like PO’ed: Definitive Edition before it, for me Killing Time: Resurrected taps into a particularly potent strain of 3DO nearly thirty years after its original release. Certainly when Killing Time was unleashed by unsuspecting owners of Panasonic’s console hardware some three decades ago, it wasn’t an especially mechanically sound or satisfying first-person shooter, but like PO’ed it also did certain genre tropes and things sufficiently differently that it warranted your attention.
And again, akin to PO’ed, Killing Time feels like a highly unlikely candidate for a remaster – let alone one that would enjoy the calibre of restoration that those wizards over at Nightdive Studios are capable of. All the same, I’m extremely happy that while Killing Time isn’t strictly a great shooter in the traditional sense, its quirkiness is now nonetheless maintained for an all-new generation of gamers to experience in arguably its most technically accomplished form.
Killing Time: Resurrected PS5 Review
Nightdive Studios Pulls A Flawed, If Stylish FPS From Obscurity And Gives It The A1 Remaster Treatment
Though the FPS genre was still relatively nascent when Killing Time released in 1995, that didn’t stop original developer Studio 3DO from innovating in earnest and the most immediate way that manifests to the player is through Killing Time’s story. Elevated above extremely thin, often incorporeal text-based narratives that were glimpsed in comparable efforts of the day such as Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, Killing Time instead weaves an intriguing tale.
Unfurling in the early ‘dirty’ 1930s, Killing Time: Resurrected puts players in the shiny shoes of a student looking to further their studies in the field of Egyptology, only to find themselves trapped in a grand estate owned by a maddened heiress who, in attempt to make herself immortal by way of an ancient Egyptian ritual, screws the whole thing up, causing everyone in the grounds to disappear and a horde of supernatural enemies to exist in their place.
Tasked with not just surviving but rooting out the dark cause of this calamity, Killing Time: Resurrected imparts its narrative beats in an innovative way to the player. Essentially, as you stalk around the various grounds of the estate and within the manor interior itself, you’ll come across ghostly echoes of the estate’s past denizens, replaying their conversations with each other in gloriously sholocky FMV sequences right in front of your eyes, as the various upper class toffs insult and frolic with each other while Killing Time’s somewhat dark supernatural setting begins to take hold. It’s neat stuff honestly, and certainly represents a better attempt to weave a plot for what would now be considered to be a boomer shooter than many other of its analogues.
As one could readily imagine in 1995 this is quite the sight. Seeing full motion video sequences played out in a real-time 3D environment felt game-changing at the time (even though it would rarely be used thereafter), and even in 2024, the effect, though dulled by the passage of time, is still somewhat neat to behold all these years later and oddly I wish more folks would leverage it in contemporary titles (the recently released 7th Guest VR remake is one such good example of this technology employed in a more modern title).
Gameplay-wise, Killing Time: Resurrected follows a similar throughline to other shooters of its era, which is to say there’s a lot of enemy blasting, key collecting and arsenal building to be done en route to the final battle. There’s also a smidgen of puzzle solving to be done, but really the conundrums feel more like garnish for the slaughter which precede them, rather than a centrifugal element of the game design itself.
Speaking of the slaughter, it’s fair to say that the combat in Killing Time: Resurrected is somewhat uneven. First the good, though. Killing Time: Resurrected boasts perhaps the most eclectic cast of baddies I’ve seen in just about any first-person shooter in ages. To this end, enemies include such foes as possessed ducks, two-headed charging poodles, bewitched groundskeepers, evil clowns (that pop red balloons when they die), massive red ants, angry ghosts, zombified cleaning maids and so much more besides. It’s pretty nuts in the best way.
What’s less nuts is the combat side of things, which feels under baked on a number of different fronts. For a start, you don’t have a default melee attack when you begin the game and though you do pick up a melee weapon (a crowbar) later on in the game, it still feels like an odd omission considering that even 1993’s DOOM allowed you to provide bad folks with an infinite diet of knuckle sandwiches from the get go.
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Next up, the actual combat itself just isn’t that satisfying. Sure, though you have access to a variety of weapons including pistols, shotguns, tommy guns, Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers and even a special ankh that can be used to devastate a group of foes, it all just feels a bit weak and limp. In particular, the tommy guns and pistols feel and sound especially tame, giving off sounds that approximate an angry rattle, rather than the roar of a firearm loudly launching its compacted payload in whatever direction it happens to be pointed in.
Another issue is that Killing Time: Resurrected is a rather easy affair, even on the higher difficulty levels. Not only are ammo pickups almost as plentiful as the enemies you’ll encounter, but enemies have a good chance to also drop health orbs that heal a good twenty percent of your health, too. Combined with the speed of your movement and a general lack of intelligence on the part of your foes, the combat in Killing Time: Resurrected doesn’t feel anywhere near as tense or exhilarating as it should.
One other problem that blights the gameplay loop of Killing Time: Resurrected is the colour-coded key system that other shooters have also used in the past to effectively gate progression. Here, as you get into the later stages of the game, there is a whole heap of backtracking to be done, thanks to coloured keys which provide access to areas you’ve discovered earlier on. Unfortunately due to the lack of teleports or any other kind of fast travel, it can soon become a chore. Equally, when you collect keys, the inventory screen is nowhere big enough or informative enough to let you know exactly what keys you have – a fact that would prove to be even more frustrating for colour blind gamers.
None of this of course, detracts from the roundly superb job that remastering savants Nightdive Studios have done on Killing Time: Remastered. Not only does the game boast up to 4K resolution visuals that can run up to a buttery smooth 120 frames per second, but all of the digitised enemy sprites have been remodelled in high resolution and now look quite striking to say the least. Though of course, should these changes not be to your taste, you can toggle a number of these enhancements to drag the game back to 1995.
Beyond the superficiality of its audiovisual presentation (which also incidentally includes an unexpectedly jazzy soundtrack that feels somewhat at odds with the on-screen violence), Killing Time: Resurrected also brings a whole heap of cut material from the original title into this remastered version. That means you get access to all new areas that just weren’t there in the 3D0 version of the game, together with a heap of lovingly restored extras and behind the scenes bonus material. To say that Nightdive Studios has a deep love for Killing Time would be something of an understatement indeed.
Though Killing Time: Resurrected can’t really hang with other boomer shooters in 2024, let alone more contemporary fare from a fundamentals perspective, I’m still happy that Nightdive Studios has cemented its heroic status by remastering it to an extremely high standard anyway and its love for the source material is abundantly clear. In spite of its clunky and flawed fundamentals, Killing Time is indicative of a shooter that wasn’t afraid to try new things in 1995 and if there’s one thing that remains true even now, it’s that more FPS efforts could certainly learn to take a risk or two.
Killing Time: Resurrected releases for PS4 and PS5 on October 18, 2024.
Review code kindly provided by PR.