Time Space Rebuild Review

You play as a time-traveler who must stop the Doomsday, but you lost your memory as a side effect from the time jumping. After getting help from another time-traveler who knows you, you are captured by the organization you work for. They verify your memory loss and, naturally, immediately send you on an important mission to protect and recover a person named Ivy back in 1950.

The writing is terrible for just about every reason you can imagine. There is way too much boring exposition. Character dialogue is dumb and strained. There is a bit where a person is shot from an unknown direction and everybody nonchalantly checks the victim instead of taking cover. One of your colleagues takes you back to 1999 for a ‘date’, despite this breaking the company’s rules. The person you must recover, Ivy (aged 18), behaves like an immature six year-old. And you spend stupidly long following Ivy around doing mundane shit that doesn’t matter.

Just about every scene with romance is unnatural. There are equal parts cliché and cringe here. Hidden branches often feature crude romance without context. It even fumbles scenes that should have been an easy win, like when Yolanda (Ivy’s maid) asks for help while she’s cooking and you just end up giving her a shoulder massage. Arya, the beautiful and scantily clad Japanese woman in your head, seems to be written by a 12 year-old. Nora Chen is barely in this, aside from some random flashback scenes. And Charlotte’s romance parts are generally all bad.

The audio is horrendous. Let me be clear, having English voice dub is good for accessibility, but how it all works stinks. Two main characters (Ivy and Charlotte) speak English while two others (Nora and Yolanda) speak Chinese. You can select either English or Chinese audio on-the-fly but the English voices are dreadful (possibly AI) and not close to matching lip movements, with voiceover based on translation errors. Chinese audio is superior but still a bad example of ADR (automatic dialogue replacement). Only Arya’s Japanese voice is good, since it is mostly live recorded in her isolated white room.

There is less than two hours of content to run through this the first time and another hour to unlock all scenes. Probably the only good thing about this game is that some of the fights are decently choreographed but that is nowhere near a good enough reason to get it.