Killing Time Resurrected (PC)

It’s that time of the month, another forgotten shooter’s been resurrected by Nightdive Studios, the masters of bringing forgotten classics back from obscurity. This time Nightdive have picked up the 3DO’s (and PC’s) often forgotten Killing Time. Released on 17th October 2024 on all major formats, is Killing Time one to be left to time, or is it a welcome addition let’s have a look.

Killing Time Resurrected follows the story of a college student who’s on an adventure to solve the mystery behind a missing Egyptian artefact. Previously the “Water-Clock of Thoth” had been discovered by a professor, but was soon missing after a visit by our overall antagonist Tess Conway. Tess we find has taken the artefact back to her island and used it. Unfortunately this has had catastrophic consequences to the inhabitants of the island, and they’ve all turned into ghouls, zombies and other horrible things. It’s up to you to sort it.

After the first initial cutscene you’re thrown straight into action with enemies already at you, a typical FPS from the era but Killing Time feels so nice with some modern updates. We have some nice fluid movement, combat straight away feels nice too. With a pistol and shotgun unlocked within the first few minutes you’re immediately blasting away some prohibition era gangsters blocking your path before you enter the full complex, the further you go in, the more firepower you have access to, it’s believed Killing Time had the first uses of a Tommy Gun and Molotov Cocktails in shooters, along with flame throwers and much later an Ankh which will damage almost every enemy on screen. For an early shooter we’ve a good array of weapons with some unique choices, especially with the Molotov Cocktail appearing in many other shooters going forward, Killing Time set the pace for a lot of shooters going forward.

Enemies follow what we find in Doom, with typical soldiers, being like undead soldiers and imps, melee based fighters, and quite a lot of different flying enemies, with this being a 1995 shooter though working out some differences in enemy types would have been difficult. But we have a good variety in visuals, with evil grannies (?) , previously mentioned prohibition thugs, bats, and evil poodles with 2 heads. These all look good and have a good amount of charm too them. Compared to the enemies we saw in Nightdive’s previous game PO’d Definitive Edition, Killing Times enemies has a much better visual style to it.

The game is massive, with it feeling somewhat like a lite metroidvania, traversing the areas looking for switches to unlock the next bit. This brings my first negative to Killing Time, which is somewhat typical to games like this, once everything’s dead and you’re wandering trying to find the next section, it can feel somewhat empty, with a lack of map to your disposal too finding where you need to go, it can be a struggle navigating.

Visually the remaster nails it, the original character sprites have been lovingly updated so they all pop, these have been brought through from the original 3DO version of the game where motion capture was used for all human characters, whereas the original pc version used sprites which took much away from the charm of the original. All in game cutscenes have been updated too so all acted scenes can be viewed in full resolutions as opposed to extremely compressed 3DO visuals. Levels have been massively opened up visually too, here we flip the script and have the PC version favoured, originally the 3DO version looked more like a 3D maze. Nightdive have transformed Killing Time into a much nicer visual affair and falls more inline with modern retro shooters and I’m all here for it.

Audio is nice, with each different area in the game having unique music, for example setting into a house on a cliff your music is changed to something more intense from something a bit more spooky whilst navigating the rocks, I wouldn’t suggest it’s dynamic but it’s nice to have music changing up whenever you change location. Enemies will quite happily repeat their single catchphrase or noise though, so you’ll hear a lot of ducks unless you kill them all. Weapons sound ok too, with an adequate meaty shotgun sound but the Tommy Gun sounds a little wet.

Killing Time feels like a much welcome addition to Nightdives library, whilst we still wait some big hitters like The Operative No-One Lives Forever, System Shock 2, and personally for me Terminator Future Shock, we get something much more forgotten about from Nightdive. Here Killing Time isn’t usually something people mention, but I’m hugely glad it’s been updated as it’s definitely something I’d have played back then.