TimeShift Review

To say that TimeShift's development has been a roller coaster ride is something of an understatement. Produced by Russian outfit Saber Interactive and originally picked up by Atari as a budget title for the original Xbox, the first-person shooter was upgraded as one of the publisher's games for Xbox 360...and then got sold off when Atari amputated brands and studios. Signed by Vivendi Games in Spring 2006 and given an extra year in development, the TimeShift of today is quite different from the one originally conceived.

Let's go through the checklist of what Saber Interactive has ripped out in the past fifteen months since Atari sold the brand: the visual style, the storyline, the physics engine, the main character, and a refinement of the time control system. In short, the only two things that this version of TimeShift and the one originally touted by Saber and Atari in 2005: the name 'TimeShift' and the fact that the protagonist has the ability to bend time.

Back to the future

The game begins with an explosive pre-rendered sequence setting up the background to how the unnamed (and masked) protagonist came to wear the 'Beta Suit', the second of two prototype body suits that can manipulate time. As the building explodes, he chases the user of the Alpha Suit - a megalomaniac called Aiden Krone - into a world Krone creates by perversely alternating history into one where he rules all in a 'City 17' kind of way. Seemingly a world in perpetual rainfall thanks to Krone's experiments, the time-traveller with no name is tasked with joining the local resistance and righting what once went wrong, hoping that the next leap, will be the next home... apologies to Quantum Leap fans.

Thanks to advances in quantum physics and the applications that go along with that, players have the ability to manipulate time in three different ways (time reverse, time stop, and slow time) for a limited time. Given the fact that the ability to stop time is by far the most advantageous to players, it can only be used for a few seconds, with both time reverse and slow mo allowing an extra couple of seconds. For most of the time, the powers are used in the heat of battle, enabling gamers to safely take down distant enemies, avoid getting hit by a grenade, or even rip out the gun from opponents' hands...unless the weapon is 'magnetically' sealed to the soldier's hands, naturally.

But just as the thought that the ability to manipulate time is nothing more than a loose gimmick, TimeShift throws in a selection of puzzles where they become essential to use. Side-shifting the gameplay to include time-based puzzles that so desperately craves a comparison to Valve's memorable physics puzzles in Half-Life 2, TimeShift's often uses the reliable - if a little dull - see-saw trick, stopping time so that players can cross the beam without it moving. Others are a little more creative however, with other sequences having players slow down time to jump across rotating propellers, or reverse time to switch the flow of air in a wind tunnel.

Undaunted by the small smattering of puzzles on offer, including a walk on water trick to rival that of a certain individual, TimeShift's bread and butter gameplay rests with the waves of encounters against armed grunts. Perhaps it's the inevitable effect of mass cloning, but Krone's armies seem to have less intelligence than a family of under-performing hicks, seemingly deaf when one of their comrades is being blown apart just a hundred metres away, and generally enjoying less tactical awareness than a drunk. Sure, some will take cover, but all too often the game relies on just throwing groups of soldiers into the battle at once.

A shift in time...

Generally, the journey to eradicate Krone and his nightmarish pseudo-fascist world is a largely forgettable experience with around ten hours of clambering up and down ladders, lifts, and air shafts, travelling through landscapes of bland buildings and streets, and occasionally using mounted guns on vehicles. Aside from the time manipulation, which isn't exactly a new idea in either gaming in general or first-person shooters specifically, there's very little that stands out in TimeShift - it even has what now seems to be the obligatory lame final encounter with the main boss, joining the likes of Prey and The Darkness.

There are however, a varied enough set of weapons to keep gamers happy, even though they're largely the usual collection of assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, and pistols seen in the genre for years, albeit with different names (a shotgun here is a 'Scattergun'). TimeShift even features a crossbow not too dissimilar to the Torque Bow found in Epic's Gears of War - though a powerful plasma weapon called the Surge Gun is something of a token original weapon. It's this 'beg, steal, and borrow' approach that makes much of TimeShift feel very familiar right from the off.

In many ways TimeShift has much in common with another Vivendi brand, namely F.E.A.R., which since its jaw-dropping debut on PC back in 2005 managed to age inextricably by the time it launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2006 and early 2007. A penchant for time manipulation in the gameplay, waves of generic soldiers gunning for your bloodied and broken body, and bland environments, are prevalent in both titles making us wonder at times whether there's a development template hidden in the depths of Vivendi Games that details a series of mandatory features that all their first-person shooters must have. For all its occasional time-based puzzles and visual details like showing individual drops of rain when time stands still, TimeShift is a very 'by numbers' FPS experience, rarely standing out from an already crowded genre - especially on Xbox 360. Even on launch day, the game feels old (a likely casualty of its difficult production), with the typical cliffhanger end to the trawling single-player Campaign making us plead that a sequel will address the generic experience to be had here.

A level of applause can at least be made to Saber for taking the time bending features of the Campaign to a sixteen-player multiplayer mode, which otherwise offers the usual smattering of maps, weapons, and modes you'd expect to find in an FPS. The inclusion of Time Grenades, setting off small pockets of 'slow mo' time that can trap opponents in a bubble, allowing players to shoot at them like fish in a barrel is a nice touch for instance. Of course, the bullets also slow down in the bubble, but the effect is still the same. Despite such touches however, there's very little threat posed to the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and TimeShift's multiplayer is just as likely to fall off the radar as Prey and Shadowrun did before it.