I rate the game It's Killing Time 3/5. It's okay i guess. Mediocre. I can only barely recommend this game and mostly only because it's fairly cheap.
This is another one of those choose-your-own-adventure type text-based games in the same basic style (but not of the same quality) as Choice of Robots, Choice of Alexandria or Champion of the Gods. It features the same huge flaw; the inability to simply turn the page back to a previous choice or a previous page.
I have to admit though, on my first play through I was very impressed with this game. It's campy and silly and purposefully cliched in many of the right ways. The descriptions are good and visceral but the writing style never takes itself seriously as it is continually heavy-handed. In a way, this is a very well-done parody of those dime-a-dozen thriller novels featuring assassins and murder-for-hire secret organizations and so forth. The choices seem interesting and it feels as though each choice may be very important and could potentially lead to a very different conclusion. Unfortunately any sense of choice this game provides is largely an illusion.
I started to see some serious draw-backs to this game during my second and third times through. Some choices seem to have fairly arbitrary results and all choices ultimately lead you either to the exact same death paragraph or the exact same final battle encounter. Some paragraphs are swapped in or out in favor of others depending on how evil your character is or depending on which side characters you've chosen to support along the way but the story is, very unfortunately, largely the same no matter what you do, unless you act extremely stupidly and manage to die before the story's end.
Worse still, despite the initially compelling sense of danger this game provides, this game is actually extremely forgiving, particularly given its subject matter. Situations in which you should instantly die merely cause you to be wounded and you will usually have the opportunity to get healed before the next chapter. Once, I literally played through the game trying to get my character killed and didn't manage it until well into the second half of this game's story, mostly because I refused to allow him to get healed whenever the opportunity to do so presented itself.
From the standpoint of being challenged to find the right path to a successful ending of some kind, this game practically plays itself and worst of all, you get pretty much the same ending (only with different moral overtones) no matter what choices you make. There is a single juncture at which you can either choose to end the game or continue but that is almost the only real decision that really seems to matter so far as changing the story's ultimate ending. The potential have the amazing experience of peering into a myriad of radically altered versions of the future, each based on your different potential choices, a trait which should ideally be common to all choose-your-own-adventure type games/stories, is largely ignored here.
There is no way, for example, to choose to side with the story's antagonists. There is no way to try to escape the confines of the story's plot and lead a life that is irrelevant to being an assassin (you can't drop everything and become a used car salesman instead). There is no way to simply ♥♥♥♥ around and do nothing until you get killed. The game forces you to go on airplane flights, to take certain missions, to go to Miami. Even if you fail all your early assassination missions, the game's final confrontation will still happen where it always does. No matter what skills you emphasize along the way, if you win, the villain will still be brought down in a very similar way (during a kung fu fight). This game offers few true choices. Playing it more than once merely kills your time.
