Immortus Temporus is one of those games where the store description does a great job of sexing up what’s actually on offer. What we have here, in fact, is a fairly straightforward puzzle game with an emphasis on achieving the fastest completion time. This is most likely because the game was created by a speedrunner, at least according to the excitable game blurb.
The goal is simple. Your job is to direct your hockey puck around a series of increasingly complex maze-like arenas, in which you need to scoop up all the green dots before making it to the exit portal. Each level also houses some pesky red portals, which come in varying shapes, sizes and quantities. They will also move across some levels in patterns, and will zap you back to your start point and cost you previous seconds if you so much as touch them. I’ve tried my best, but I can’t make it sound much more exhilarating than that I’m afraid.
This is also partly because of how bland Immortus Temporus looks. The incredibly basic visuals don’t do much to distract from the simple gameplay. It looks most like a digital version of a tabletop games compilation.
There are no lives as such in Immortus Temporus, and if you run out of time you will restart immediately. This keeps the tempo pacey, as this is a game all about speed. The idea with every level is to figure out the quickest way to complete it, as each should have multiple solutions. However, the first few are so straightforward they don’t do much to test your grey matter. Your fastest completion time will be recorded for each stage, and there is a gold target time to hit. You’ll need to achieve a certain amount of these to access the later levels.
However, before long the difficulty is ever so slightly dialled up. You won’t often struggle in figuring out what to do, but sometimes executing it can prove tricky. This is because your little puck is moved with the left thumbstick, but due to the sensitivity and how small the green dots are you’ll often glide right past them, failing to make contact and by extension your attempt at the level. What really brings it home, is that all the menus are navigated in the same way. It’s for this reason that things can get a little tedious.
In a rather unhelpful twist, your screen will change colour and distort if you are stuck on a level for too long. The first time this happened monochrome colours kicked in, and for a few frightening seconds I genuinely thought my TV had thrown in the towel.
At times this movement inaccuracy can become frustrating, such as when you are required to move between red portals of which there is a slither of space between. You’ll most likely be zapped back to the start point a fair few times before you crack it, and get to move on. As the difficulty curve isn’t smooth, you can speed through several levels on the bounce, but every now and then a slightly more tricky one will pop up seemingly out of nowhere.
It’s a good job then, that there are 100 levels to blast through in Immortus Temporus. Each is over in a matter of seconds, but at that classic £4.19 price point it’s hard to complain. There is also an easy 1000G on offer too, which can be earned during the first 30 levels without too much difficulty.
Despite being a simple, quickfire puzzle game Immortus Temporus lacks that illusive combination which gives games of this ilk the one more go factor. Its components don’t quite gel at times which leaves seeing out the levels feeling like a chore more than anything else.
Despite some grand promises of strategic and challenging gameplay, Immortus Temporus instead offers an inconsistent experience which isn’t all that puzzling after all.
Pick up Immortus Temporus from the Xbox Store right now
