Time Takers, the team-based survival shooter from Mistil Games and publisher NCSOFT, is running a closed beta on Steam from March 13th to March 21st. The test covers North and South America, with daily play windows of eight hours to keep matchmaking tight. A global beta is planned ahead of the full launch later this year on both PC and consoles.
The pitch is simple enough to state but strange enough to stick: time is your health bar, your currency, and your team's shared lifeline. Every player runs on Time Energy, a resource that depletes when you spend it upgrading abilities or pushing builds mid-fight. The twelve playable characters range from a spacesuited monkey to a feudal Japanese samurai, and none of them slot into fixed roles. There are no healers, no tanks, no locked archetypes. What you become in any given match depends entirely on how you choose to spend your seconds. Pair a character's core ability with different weapons and passive apps and the same pick plays completely differently from one round to the next.
That flexibility feeds directly into the combat. Matches run in trios across three battle zones: Yokogawa, built around a Japanese aesthetic; Morstadt, all medieval corridors; and the neon-soaked Miraesi. Each match progresses through seven phases, and as those phases advance the available Time Energy shrinks while the pressure to fight ratchets up. Early rounds give teams room to collect resources and build momentum, but later phases squeeze everyone into tighter, more desperate engagements. Ten weapons round out the arsenal, all tuned for the kind of high-speed, high-mobility combat where positioning and timing matter as much as accuracy. The tension isn't just about landing shots. It's about whether you can afford to take them.
The real wrinkle is what happens between teammates. Time Energy isn't just personal. You can share your remaining lifespan with a squadmate who's running low, keeping them in the fight at the cost of your own survival window. That decision, whether to hoard your seconds or burn them keeping an ally alive for one more push, sits at the centre of every round. Team composition and resource sharing can flip a losing fight into a last-second win, but misjudge the timing and the whole squad bleeds out together. Coordination isn't a bonus here. It's the difference between a comeback and a collapse.
Matches are built to be short and relentless. There's no downtime between phases, no safe moment to catch your breath. The pacing compresses as the clock ticks down, turning every round into a series of escalating gambles where holding back carries its own risk. Spend too conservatively and you enter the final phases underpowered. Spend too aggressively and you might not reach them at all.
Players looking to get involved can register through the Steam store page, and the Time Takers Discord is running community events during the beta period including clip highlights and invite challenges. For a shooter built around a resource you can never get back, the closed beta is the first chance to find out whether that pressure translates into something that holds together when real teams start pulling it apart.