Review: Timeshift (360)

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then by that definition the development team of Saber Interactive must really like Half-Life, Halo, Gears of War, Turok, TimeSplitters, Call of Duty 2, F.E.A.R., pretty much every single stand-out FPS game in existence, as TimeShift is one of the most unoriginal FPS games to be released on the Xbox 360. It’s not so much a game of shooting; it’s more of a game of "spot the reference." Unfortunately, the rampant homage’s to various FPS games and very few unique ideas will mean that this otherwise decent shooter will be left on shelves this Christmas.

The game cast you in the role of a nameless scientist (among other things) who is working on a secret project to create two suits that travel true time for no sensible purpose. The project leader, Dr. Krone (Geddit? It’s a time joke! Krone=Kronos, hahahaha!) is working on the "Alpha" suit, while you and two colleagues were working on the "Beta" suit. Of course, having no other reason to use the thing, Dr Krone uses the Alpha suit to travel in time and remake the world in his own image and blow up the research facility. Meanwhile, you strap into the Beta suit and give chase just as the facility is destroyed, crash landing you in the alternative present of…1939 where Dr. Krone has taken over and basically turned the world into City 17 from Half-Life 2, complete with having himself on massive TV screens reassuring the populace that his rule is just. From then on, your suit’s female A.I. Cortana…sorry "S.S.A.M." advises you to help the resistance to stop Krone, so you can acquire the McGuffin from his Alpha suit and return home and make everything right. What follows is 10-15 hours of shooting, throwing grenades that glow blue and stick to people, taking cover as your suits shield recharges after taking damage, riding around Highway 17 on a quad bike while fighting enemies that range from generic troopers, to generic troopers with jetpacks, sometimes with a crossbow that fires exploding arrows.

As you can tell, Gamestyle isn’t really enamoured with the game’s liberal borrowing of other games mechanics. True, most FPS games have similar themes anyway, but it’s literally like Saber interactive looked at their original, steampunk inspired time game, decided that it didn’t have enough of what the other landmark games of the genre had, scrapped the whole idea and just added a checklist of what they thought made those games sell. Cynical? Maybe, but it doesn’t make it any less true. It even has minefields marked with German signs, despite the distinct lack of Nazis in the game.

Luckily the games time powers go some way to alleviating this, but even those have their basis in other games. The Beta suit has three time-based abilities, slow, stop, rewind. The one that will get the most use will be slow, which slows down everyone else in the game and gives you a small speed boost, allowing you to dodge missiles, shoot or melee your snail-paced enemies, dash through openings, basically everything it did in F.E.A.R. The second ability, stop, is used for doing similar thing but in a short time period, but mainly passing through fires that would hurt you normally, or crossing over pools of electrified water. Rewind is similarly only really used for one or two situations, either when you’ve got a grenade stuck to you, or when you need go up a lift that only has a down button for some reason. There’s some real potential for these time powers to allow you to do some enjoyable things, but they are generally used for killing a lot of people very quickly, getting through doors, or crossing chasms. It’s a real shame that the game’s one distinguishing feature isn’t implemented well enough to make the game a definite purchase.

The multiplayer, in theory, could rectify this with its unique approach to the time powers. Instead of having the ability to slow down time and such whenever you want, which would be a major annoyance to other players, the multiplayer features time grenades, which put the effect of the time powers in a small localised area. It actually works quite well and you see some quite tactical uses of them. The multiplayer features the usual smattering of modes, death match, capture the flag, and so forth, but there are a couple of modes unique to the game. King of time features a time sphere that players contest over which make you unique to the effects of the time grenades allowing you to get a lot of kills quickly (similar to Halo’s Juggernaut mode, really) Then there’s Meltdown Madness, where your team throw time grenades at the opposing teams reactor to slow down it’s obliteration. They’re fun modes, but aside from these there’s really nothing new in the multiplayer game. Plus it can be difficult to get a game going on Xbox Live, considering we couldn’t join half of them despite slots being open and being hosted on an apparently "Good" connection according to the list of games available.

Basically, Timeshift is a decent game marred by a massive amount of already used ideas and not enough unique appeal, even with its time travelling mechanics. Customers who see this on a shelf, which also contains the likes of Halo 3, The Orange Box, and Call of Duty 4, will probably leave the game out in the cold this winter.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Garry Webber