Timeslip is a good bargain bin game if I ever saw one. It's fun, and the storyline could use a tweak, but it does set the mood for the entire game. Basically, a race from the future is losing their planet to some form of disasters. Don't remember if they were natural or caused by the people causing it themselves over time, but they choose Earth as a suitable planet to move in on. They can't possibly fight the futuristic tech the Earth people have at their disposal, so they send troops back in time to take over at 5 key points in Earth history. They succeed, Humanity gets erased from the time stream, and they get a new planet to call their own. Earth scientists learn about the plot and fast track time travel tech so they can combat the threat. The aliens learn about the attempt to fight them and bomb the facility from the air, killing all the soldiers and scientists. All but one. This is where you come in. You are this lone scientist, armed with military hardware you seem to have learned overnight how to use, ready to fight for the human race or die trying. This could not possibly be used as a spoiler, since this is all told to you in the opening credits of the game before you even press the start button.

The gameplay itself is somewhat repetitive. It's your standard run and gun over platforms with enemies that sometimes spawn endlessly off screen. It keeps you moving though with a time counter of sorts. A simple white bar that starts only partly full to begin with slowly ticks away as you move through the level. You refill it by picking up crystals. If your time runs out, you lose a life. That's a save right there. If it were less forgiving, it could say you ran out of time to be in the period of history and snap you back to the present. But it doesn't, which makes it somewhat easier. You get 9 lives to work with, each with 6 charges in a hit counter. You get hit, you lose a mark in the counter. Lose 5, the bar is empty. At that point, the next hit you take pops you out of existence in a pop flash of light that makes me think of a light bulb that suddenly burns out on you. To restore your bar, you have to find crates that were sent back to supply the soldiers. Inside some of them, you find batteries. 1 battery, 1 charge in your hit meter. If you have a full meter when you pick one up, it gives you a life back and a mark in the depleted bar of the life you just regained. So you could go from 2 with a full bar to 3 with one bar filled. So as you can probably guess, the 1up system is there in the sense of charging your battery to get a free try. The downside to this is in the fact you lose all 9 of your lives, that's it. You had your chance. There is no continue screen.

The sound and music are pretty decent for this game. It's as if they made a great score and sound effects at the cost of a little of the graphical budget. Still well worth it. The music itself is rememberable, albeit maybe a little repetitive after a while when you have had to play through the same level 4 times because you died to a cannon blipping your last bar of heath on your last life out of existence. Still, it is good music.

The graphics do well in the level detail, but the sprites suffer a little. That's all I can say on that.

The controls take a little time to get used to, with an 8 direction firing radius unless you are on the ground. Then it's just fire all directions up or belly to the ground and fire straight ahead.

Overall, it's a good game. I've played it several times. Never beat it mind you, but there is always the next attempt. Worth $10 at max if you found it in your local second hand shop. Any more then this, I would walk away saying something about overcharging.