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In multiplayer shooters, you're always on the clock. Whether it's racing against another team to score objective tickets or fighting within the last seconds of a round, there's no getting away from it: every second counts. But no game takes that quite as literally as Time Takers, a team-based shooter where the goal is to fight for time itself.
Still, the Time Energy you fight over in Time Takers goes beyond a simple objective. Every player enters a match with a lifespan, which can be extended with Time Energy and even spent, on levelling up skills, for example, or extending your ally's lifespan. It's a fascinating concept – developer Mistil Games goes into more detail here – and soon we'll be able to check it out for ourselves, as Time Takers has set a date for its first closed beta test (CBT) and explained how we'll be able to jump in.
The first CBT is set to run from March 13 to March 21, and if you're already interested in taking part, you can sign up by requesting access on Time Takers' Steam page. However, it's worth noting that only players within eight countries – United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru – will be able to sign up and jump in automatically. All is not lost if you live elsewhere, as NCSOFT will be sharing promotional codes in Time Takers' Discord – but this is the only way you'll be able to play outside of America, so make sure to join if you're keen to be one of its first players.
As for what will be available in the CBT, Time Takers is coming out of the gate swinging. The shooter will have 12 playable characters, who range from the first chimp in space to a 15th-century samurai. That range is particularly exciting when you take its three-player teams, spread of weapons, and Apps (passive skills) into account – it's a huge amount of combinations to play with from the beginning. Likewise, there will be three maps available in the CBT, and all speak to the way Time Takers treats time as a curiosity: we'll be fighting across Japanese battlefield Yokogawa, medieval Morstadt, and futuristic city Miraesi.
Given the premise of Time Takers, it makes sense to hear that those battles are intended to be high-tempo. If your remaining lifespan hits zero you're out of the game, so keeping competitive means staying well-stocked on Time Energy – which can either be found across the map, or taken from other players and neutral monsters.
But this is a hero shooter without predefined roles. Players spend Time Energy on level-ups and skills to mold their playstyle more naturally, and as a result, matches get far harder to predict once Time Energy's flowing. Teams could keep their distance, for example, farming as much as possible before fighting decisively and at full strength later in the game; while more aggressive players may seek to interfere with the enemy's levelling to force early-match setbacks. There's only one constant: the longer a match goes on for, the faster players' lifespans are drained – so for all of the plotting and calculating that can go into the power-scaling dynamic, finales are guaranteed to be hectic slugfests.
Speaking personally, I love seeing Time Takers double-down on its novelties. The shooter scene has quietly become one of the most experimental genres out there, with developers taking the most basic of templates – point gun, shoot gun – and transposing it to a wealth of settings. Just look at how hardcore survival shooters fed into the creation of battle royales, in turn birthing some of the most casual-friendly shooters of modern gaming. Those same survival shooters also branched into extraction shooters, where titles range from ultra-hard realism sims to punchy in-and-out ; and that's all without touching on so many genres.
If Time Takers' originality speaks to you as much as it does to me, I'd recommend checking out its CBT. There's no better time to get a read on a game – and even help shape it – than the beginning, which makes the CBT all the more exciting. Mistil Games and NCSOFT are even encouraging you to get your friends involved, as inviting someone to the game's Discord server will put you in for a shot of winning a year of Discord Nitro. But let's not count our years before our seconds: check out Time Takers on Steam, arrange your CBT access ahead of March 13, and get stuck in.
