You play Hickory, a mouse, trying to reach the top of the grandfather clock, with all manner of cuckoos, cogs and soldiers in the way, all in tune with the hourly cycle. There are switches to change the clock's direction, and to open up the passageways that can lead you to the top. Watch out for screws and getting crushed by the switching blocks though, or it's the end of poor Hickory!

Although this is a fairly typical platform game, there are elements of gameplay that use the theme of time beyond just setting it inside a grandfather clock. -Paul N

This game is very well presented. The sprites and animation are very nice. Overall it seems very professional and complete. -Paul N

This looks almost as good as many finished games I played back in the day. Love the mouse animations. If the front end had been good too I would've given this 9. -Alex

Hickory controls well and the level design is good (if a bit difficult). -Paul N

Pretty hard - and way too many pixel perfect jumps involved in it for my liking. That said, it's better than the other 2 platformers, I found myself having "one more go" for a good long time. -Alex

It was created using 'games factory'. I'm unsure exactly how much this does for you. However, given the timeframe, this was probably a wise choice. -Paul N

I'm guessing that most of the hard stuff was handled for you by the engine. -Alex

Old skool platformer. Great fun. Good level design, mechanics work well. Charming animation of mouse. Rock hard! Kept me coming back for more. -Phil

Only Hickory functioned 100% bug free, but even so I liked it more anyway. I'm a big fan of 2D pixelated platformers featuring an animal protagonist, so it was right up my street! Plus, the death animation was classic! -George

Use of Shift as a play key poor choice – Windows kept asking for ‘Sticky shift keys’. -Paul F

Retro platform feel reminded me of old favourites like Manic Miner. -Paul F

Aliens from the future disrupt the space-time continuum when they are destroyed. Patches of red space slow down time, and blue space speeds up time. Use this to your advantage by dodging bullets in slow time and reloading faster in quick time.

On some computers this game ran too quickly, but this bug has been fixed in the latest version.

This game uses the theme of time as a key and, as far as I'm aware unique, gameplay feature. -Paul N

Nice front end - very clean, simple, and functional. makes it feel like you're going into and out of a game. In-game graphics are a bit simplistic, but that's ok. -Alex

I really like this game! The difficulty could do with a tweak and maybe bullets should be more visible but the gameplay concept itself is great. I'd love to give it a go with geometry wars style analog stick controls. -Paul N

On paper this has the best gameplay, but in practice it's way too twitchy and fast to be fun - average game length is about 20 seconds because the whole game runs so fast. It ran at different speeds on different PCs we ran it on, which leads me to believe that there's no frame timing code or a pretty nasty bug in it - I'm assuming that this is what makes it more or less unplayable on a fast PC. -Alex

It is impressive to me that the theme of time has been used as a specific gameplay feature and has been so well implemented in such a short space of time. -Paul N

Ok. Too hard. Averagely fun. Didn't give it more than 5 minutes. -Phil

There are two games that are virtually impossible to better versions of: Breakout and Asteroids. TimeWars seemed to be in the Asteroids mode with maybe a bit of Geometry Wars thrown in, but didn't function well enough for me to be able to tell if anything fresh had brought to the game style. -George

Game ran very fast on new X200 Dual SLI graphics machine – too fast to have much success! -Paul F

Clean cut presentation. -Paul F

This is a platforming game set inside a 3D clock. Avoid falling off and getting squished by all of the moving gears and pendulums as you solve the puzzle of the game. The camera view changes allowing the use of the third dimension.

Although I like the use of animated 3d objects as platforms I don't think there is any real innovation here. -Paul N

Other than the tech it seemed a pretty "by the numbers" platformer. -Alex

There is a lot of scope for making a very nice looking level using 3d animated cogs and pendulums. Unfortunately, 48 hours is not enough time to realise the potential here. -Paul N

The controls are solid and responsive but the platforming is let down by unpredictable collision detection. I fear I shall never see what lies beyond the second pendulum. - Paul N

At the time of judging the level didn't actually contain anything beyond the second pendulum!

It seems that using 3d objects may have been a bit too ambitious to achieve good results in the given time. I think it shows the potential to evolve into something great with more time. -Paul N

This was the only 3D game, which was cool. Trying to do the collision detection with 3D rotating cogs was brave. -Alex

No menu, or on screen controls. Pressing SPACE key made it go mental. -Phil

Hung after startup, couldn’t play – sorry. -Paul F

This is a two-player game. Your objective is to beat your opponent forward in time by moving between the two time machines. Each time you reach a time machine you will skip forward two years. As you are both in the same landscape at different times you can affect your opponent's landscape by changing things in your time zone - i.e. destroying blocks and killing butterflies.

Most of the judges couldn't get this game to run - it requires the XNA libraries. There was an issue with drawing the split-screen, but this has been fixed in the latest version.

It had time travel in the theme, and it was all about racing so I think the use of theme is good, and the innovation is low / medium. -Alex

I thought the presentation was adequate, but not brilliant. The graphics were very functional, but then drawing animated sprites is pretty hard. -Alex

Two player split screen is fairly tricky. Platform games are more complicated than shooters. -Alex

It seemed like a competent little puzzle / platformer - though I didn't manage to find anyone else to play it with. -Alex

Confusing game play to begin with. Didn’t quite have the graphics feel - but unique game concept worth developing more. -Paul F