After Little Big Adventure, Adeline Software wanted to make a sequel. What they made instead was a beat-’em-up that fights its way through all of human history.
A Faster Project Born From a Stalled Sequel
Time Commando was developed by Adeline Software International and published by Electronic Arts in Europe and Activision in North America in 1996 for MS-DOS. It came about after plans for an immediate Little Big Adventure sequel proved too ambitious for a quick turnaround, and the studio pivoted to a smaller, combat-focused project instead — one built around striking 3D visuals rather than the earlier game’s exploration and puzzle-solving.
A Soldier Fighting to Save History Itself
You play a soldier pulled through time to battle a rogue computer virus threatening to corrupt and destroy key moments across history. The game plays as a beat-’em-up in a fully 3D environment, sending players through eras including prehistory, ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and feudal Japan, fighting era-appropriate enemies with weapons ranging from clubs and spears to muskets and laser rifles. The framing device — a computer virus corrupting the historical record itself — gives the wildly different settings a reason to sit side by side in the same game, rather than just being an arbitrary greatest-hits tour of history class.
Boss encounters cap off each era, typically demanding a different tactical approach than the regular grunt enemies leading up to them, which keeps the combat from feeling entirely like repeated crowd-clearing between one big fight and the next.
Mastering Each Era’s Combat
- Learn each era’s weapon moveset before rushing ahead — the combo system rewards players who adapt their approach to what a period’s specific arsenal is good at, rather than button-mashing through every stage the same way.
- Watch enemy patterns closely in the early waves of each level; Time Commando telegraphs attacks clearly, and reacting rather than guessing is the difference between a clean stage and a frustrating one.
- Don’t expect exploration or puzzle-solving to bail you out — this is a combat gauntlet through and through, so treat it with the same focus you’d bring to an arcade brawler.
- Pick up dropped weapons when your current one runs low on durability or ammunition; era-specific arsenals aren’t infinite, and getting caught empty-handed against a tough enemy is a common way to lose ground.
A Rare Pure Action Game From an Adventure Studio
Time Commando stands apart from Adeline’s better-known adventure work — Little Big Adventure and its sequel — as a pure action detour, closer in spirit to arcade beat-’em-ups like Golden Axe than to the studio’s usual blend of exploration and story. Its journey across wildly different historical periods gives it a novelty few beat-’em-ups of the era could match, even if the underlying combat loop stays fairly consistent stage to stage.
It’s also a useful reminder of how quickly Adeline Software had to pivot as a young studio. Rather than let the momentum from Little Big Adventure’s success stall while a full sequel came together, the team shipped something smaller and more focused within a couple of years, which speaks to a studio comfortable working across genres rather than repeating a single successful formula.
It’s also worth noting how Time Commando’s split European and North American publishing — Electronic Arts on one side of the Atlantic, Activision on the other — mirrors the same arrangement Adeline’s Little Big Adventure games used, a reminder of how differently regional publishing deals could be structured for a single European-developed title during this period.
The prehistoric-to-futuristic sweep of settings also let the art team experiment with wildly different color palettes and enemy silhouettes from stage to stage, which helps the game avoid the visual sameness that a lot of single-setting 3D combat titles from the same period struggled with.
Where to Buy Time Commando
If you haven’t set up DOSBox before, our complete setup guide walks through the whole process step by step.
The decision to build Time Commando around a beat-’em-up structure rather than another adventure also reflects a broader industry moment in the mid-90s, when fully 3D combat was becoming a proving ground for studios eager to demonstrate technical range beyond whatever genre had made them famous in the first place.
Getting Smooth Performance in DOSBox
If you’re playing an original DOS copy rather than the modern GOG release, mount the folder containing the game files as your C: drive, switch to it, and launch the EXE from the DOSBox command line. The game’s 3D visuals can be demanding on emulated hardware, so pushing your CPU cycle count above DOSBox’s default is often necessary to keep combat feeling smooth rather than sluggish. Set cycles to a fixed value well above the “auto” default and adjust upward in increments if fights still feel choppy — there’s a noticeable difference between an underpowered and a properly tuned setup on a game this reliant on responsive 3D combat.
Final Verdict
Time Commando is a fast, satisfying blast through gaming’s past, and the variety of weapons and settings keeps each stage feeling distinct even within a fairly repetitive core loop. The honest weak point is exactly that repetition — strip away the historical costume changes and you’re fighting the same style of wave-based encounter over and over, which becomes more apparent the longer a single sitting runs. Play it in shorter bursts, one or two eras at a time, rather than trying to marathon the whole thing, and the pacing holds up much better.
Watch a Hard-Mode Longplay
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