Game Review: Timothy vs the Aliens (Xbox Series X)

A game that gets steadily worse the longer you play it, Wild Sphere’s Timothy vs the Aliens is too flawed an experience to really enjoy.

It starts off well enough. Dropping you in the shoes of Timothy, a gangster in the 1940s. Played from the 3rd-person perspective, the first thing that stands out is the refreshing monochrome visuals. An aesthetic that really sets the tone of the game. Especially when the aliens appear in full colour. To add to that tone, the soundtrack is based in jazz and funk.

On the face of it, Timothy vs the Aliens really nails what it is going for and there can be few complaints about the visuals or sounds.

The first complaint come from the story. One that surrounds a sudden alien invasion. Aliens that Timothy is familiar with, seeing as he was abducted years before. That abduction served as a warning for an impending invasion by a different alien menace and Timothy was gifted a power. The power to slow time down allowing him to deal with enemies efficiently and quickly.

Up to this point, Timothy has used his powers to become a feared gangster but now, he’ll have to use them to save the city of Little Fish.

Explore the city, a small open-world that has a whole lot of nothing in it. There are plenty of buildings, street lamps, cars and alleyways but not a lot else. There are some characters about, giving you missions to complete so you can progress, but this is a shockingly bare playground to explore.

Both the story quests and those given by characters amount to pretty much the same thing. Point A to point B, normally collecting a key or other item to help you progress. It’s very uninspired and very easy as the world is just so small. Sometimes the item might be in a harder to reach area and that’s where some minor platforming comes into play. Timothy can jump, climb and shoot his way through the game. None of which works as well as it should seeing as it makes up the crux of gameplay.

Spread across the city is money that you collect and spend at a shop to buy weapons. Upgrading your standard handgun to a shotgun or Tommy gun. The bigger weapons will help you take down the bigger aliens quicker but most will likely stick with the Tommy gun as its spray makes aiming far easier. You can also buy keys to certain locked areas here and a key that allows you to drive vehicles. However, the driving controls are pretty awful and the city just isn’t big enough to warrant using them.

Not only that, get in a car and you’re likely to miss the hidden hotdogs or upgrade aliens, the games other collectibles. With no icons, hints or map markers to show you where these are, you’re going to have search every corner of the city to find them all. Be warned though, Timothy vs the Aliens has glitches and one such glitch saw an upgrade alien only appearing when we stood in a specific place and angled the camera in a specific direction.

This is not something that was done on purpose because it’s not the only place it happened. Throughout the game, several ladders, scaffolding and platforms just did not exist even though Timothy treated them as though they were there. It wasn’t game-breaking as we were still able to traverse the platforms but it sure made it trickier.

What was game-breaking, albeit temporarily, was somehow getting Timothy stuck in scaffolding. Meaning the game had to be restarted.

It’s all of this, the empty world, the lack of depth in missions, the ease of the main story and short runtime that makes this a pretty poor game overall. We can’t even say it’s a good for achievement hunters either as to earn all of those, gamers will have to get all the collectibles and that is not an easy or fun task.