I first heard of TimeShift from an XBox fansite. The poster was talking about how the game looked better to him than BioShock. Them’s fightin’ words, I thought to myself. I later went home and viewed the video on the marketplace for TimeShift. Wow! This game definitely looks like it could have some teeth. So, I patiently waited for a demo and played it. I liked it, but longed for more. I mean, basically we had Blinx all grown up and with some really great weapons at his disposal.
Mistah Clutch has the review.
Review score: 7.5/10
Title
Timeshift
Publisher
Vivendi Universal
Developer
Saber Interactive
Rating (ERSB and PEGI)
(ERSB) M (Mature) (OFLC) MA 15+ (PEGI) 18
Genre
First Person Shooter
Xbox live
Yes
Number of players (SP)
(SP) 1 (MP) System Link and Xbox Live: 1-16 Players
Availability
Available Now
Introductions
Futuristic scientists are working on a way to travel through time. The fruit of their labor resulted in two suits. An alpha suit and a beta suit. The main difference in the two suits would appear to be that the alpha suit allowed the user to return from their journey manually, while the beta suit has an auto-return system and advanced AI for monitoring your health and alerting you of danger (an option that can be turned off for the more advanced). During the building of the beta suit it was determined that leaving the user in control of returning from their journey whenever they deemed fit was not such a bright idea. Something could happen to them leaving them trapped forever, or they could use the time stream to their advantage. This is exactly what happens when your arch-nemisis and project lead, Dr. Aiden Krone takes a leap backwards. Upon his return, he planned a second leap, only he hadn’t planned a second return. Dun, dun, DUN! The game starts with him jumping a second time and blowing up the research facility so nobody can follow him. His fatal flaw was assuming you’d go down so easily. Ha! You’ll show him, as you grab the beta suit and jump back into an alternate reality closely resembling 1939.
Storyline
Like I stated in the intro, the storyline centers around you trying to stop Dr. Aiden Krone from changing the past and effectively stopping the future from ever having taken place. Most of the missions are pretty straight forward standard FPS missions. You fight along side a group known as the Occupants. The Occupants pretend to be fighting alongside you, but they never kill anybody or actually help you. Instead they wait for you to finish some mission or unlock some door for them. Dr. Krone’s cronies are named the Magistrate. These guys pack some serious body armor, too. When you start the game out you only have an automatic weapon, and it will take almost a full clip to take these fools out. Later on you get your hands on some really nice weapons though. My new personal favorite weapon in any FPS is the Thunderbolt. It’s basically a crossbow that fires an incendiary round. It also has a scope, making long distance kills a breeze. The incendiary round sticks to the enemy and then explodes into a nice pile of body parts a few moment later. One thing that was puzzling was that sometimes the enemy would just fall down and die. Not losing a single limb. I found that to be rather disappointing. But maybe I’m just too sadistic. Another one of my fav’s is the Hellfire. It’s a flamethrower/Tommy gun hybrid. And it kills Magistrate soldiers dead. You can use the secondary fire as a flamethrower and the machine gun fires bullets that are, well, on fire. They’ll set your enemy on fire after a few shots.
So, you go around helping the Occupants although you’re never really sure why. Sierra throws in some cut scenes, the game describes as a form of recognition for the user of the suit to battle confusion and hysteria (time travel can have some adverse affects on a person after all!), of past events throughout the game to help move the story along. The beta suit also keeps tabs of Dr. Krone’s location and intercepts video and audio feeds from the Magistrate. All this seems ancillary and the game is very linear. No big environments to go exploring or anything. Some people may complain about that, but at least you won’t get lost or turned around. The puzzles are silly. They serve almost no purpose other than an excuse to use the rewind power. There’s even a little puzzle for getting up onto a platform that is literally less than 4 feet high. Why can’t I just climb up onto the platform? Is my beta suit that constricting?
Combat
Like most FPS games, the combat consists of you using various projectile weapons and firing your way through a seemingly endless barrage of enemies. Okay, so there aren’t that many enemies, but there are barrages of them. Of course there is one twist. You have the ability to control time! Well, sort of… you have three time powers: pause/stop time; slow time; and rewind. There’s a little bar at the top of the HUD that represents your time power. Pause time drains the bar rather quickly, while merely slowing time drains it at a more gradual pace. The bar, like your health, refills after you use it. It doesn’t take that long to refill, but it takes long enough so that you can’t just use your time powers all willy-nilly to cheat your way through the game. There are 6 different chapters all broken into 4 different ‘levels’. Although, it can be a little tricky to distinguish the levels, basically after you complete 3 or 4 set objective you’ll move onto another set. Rinse and repeat until you see the achievement unlock and move onto the next chapter. TimeShift relies more on run and gun gameplay rather than strategy. Although, knowing when and which time powers to use greatly helps.
Multiplayer
While a lot of FPS games being released this year seem to throw in multi-player as a sort of post-production after thought. Sierra really concentrated on giving us a great multi-player experience. There are some nice new modes that involve the time control. Like a mode where one player is given complete time power control but all the other players are out to get him. There’s also your standard multi-player fare, deathmatch, team deathmatch, and CTF. You also get time grenades, think bubble shield but when you’re trapped inside you move super slowly leaving you a sitting duck for the other players to do with what they will. There’s some real joy to be found in TimeShift’s multi-player modes, but with the release of Halo 3, the Orange Box and CoD 4, it feels a bit like TimeShift can slip through the cracks. Hopefully with the release of a mp demo and the holiday season there will be more time altering maniacs online to frag.
Graphics
The graphics look really good in Timeshift. There are some parts of the game that seem to suffer from that “over glossy” sheen that a lot of first gen 360 games had. But it still is very satisfying watching a person turn into a heap of body parts.
Sound
The sound is very serviceable. They went the extra yard to give separate sounds for all the different surfaces you step on. Although they always sound the same, would have been nice to have a little more disparity in the footsteps. Guns sound great and the NPC’s have little conversations about the story you can over hear. There are loud speakers Dr. Krone has blasting propaganda ala Half-Life.
The Straight Dope
Although the story is thinner than this season’s flock of America’s Next Top Model contestants, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll have Occupant’s yelling at you during certain missions about having to hurry up and how there’s no time left, but there are no time limits. Then after you complete the mission, they’ll praise you. This all felt more like it was thrown in as an after thought, but you eventually realize you’re playing TimeShift for the kick ass weapons and the ability to play around with time, not for the immersive storyline and backgrounds.
Reviews
I first heard of TimeShift from an XBox fansite. The poster was talking about how the game looked better to him than BioShock. Them’s fightin’ words, I thought to myself. I later went home and viewed the video on the marketplace for TimeShift. Wow! This game definitely looks like it could have some teeth. So, I patiently waited for a demo and played it. I liked it, but longed for more. I mean, basically we had Blinx all grown up and with some really great weapons at his disposal. 
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