TimeShift

The Good
Another FPS finished, another week older. But let's look at the good features of Timeshift for a while.

In Timeshift you are a scientist (probably a theoretical physicist) and you end up in a dystopic society, ruled by a guy who likes projecting himself on big screens on the street walls, who you are going to defeat thanks to your special suit, which advises you of dangers and such. Yes, I know, this is not precisely original. What is original in Timeshift is the "time shifting" abilities of the suit that the hero of this game wears. You can either slow, stop or reverse time at your will, a bit like in the last Prince of Persia games, except for some differences. In Timeshift, not only you can do these three time actions, but you are independent of them too, that is, if you slow/stop/reverse time, you can still move in your own time, which adds some new strategies to the killing and a new dimension for the puzzles.

Other "thumbs up" for Timeshift is the graphics engine, which looks very good in high-end cards of two years ago (of 2005 that is). And all this being an in-house engine. Everything seems to cast very realistic shadows in near distance, while depth of field can go very far rendering distant objects still with the same quality as near ones. In addition, explosion effects look very spectacular provoking very believable smoke effects. It's also interesting the "depth of field" effect that blurs your vision at different distances except that you are aiming at. Another remarkable technical features are the Havok physics engine, as there are many breakable objects in each scenario and the animations of the characters, especially when killed. This is probably the first time I don't see any cadaver in a game having spasms or with a leg behind its neck due to an unlucky dying position. And, of course, the time reversing itself works perfectly even if half of the scenario is destroyed.

Another good thing is the variety in level design. At first it looks like all the game story is going to pass only in the ruined city where you start, but soon the action changes to more open scenarios like the mountains or enormous plant where the weaponry of the tyranny you are fighting is assembled. There is a couple of gameplay breaks too, with some flying combats and some points of the game where you can drive quads. It's not a great thing, but it helps making the experience less boring.

The Bad
Problem is, well, you have played this before, everybody has.

Let's look at how predictable and repetitive FPS are revising what makes Timeshift unnecessary :

• You are way better than your enemies. It's always the same thing these days, playing is about rampaging hundreds of enemies thrown at you without compassion. They don't flee, they don't try to reason with you, they don't have nothing to live for. It can be funny at first, but soon you start to get bored to kill the same guy for the 50th time and it gets so easy that you don't even try. Sometimes I wonder why do they fight, if they have family and friends..., until I remember I'm playing a modern videogame. At least in Timeshift there is a reason that makes you superior.

• Melee, gun, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper, rocket/missile launcher and two or three exotic guns. Think on the last non-WWII FPS you played, try to remember the weapons you could use? What a surprise!, you have the same weapons here. And if there was a flamethrower and a thunder gun you have exactly the same weaponry Timeshift has. The problem is not that they don't design more creative weapons, the problem is that there is not too much space to innovate already.

• Sewers, boxes, rocks and man-sized pipes. Level design falls also in many clichés of the FPSs. Warehouses full of crates or other objects distributed conveniently are found also in this game, while pipes and air conditioning channels enough big for a person to enter in crouch mode are the best way to enter a room when the door has a red light on it. In the city, these are substituted by sewers, setting hated by everybody, but unhealthily loved by every level designer. Timeshift is also short in setting quantity, there are around 6 different settings (ruined city, warehouse, grassland, green or snowy and... sewers?) and some look alike a lot. Still some levels look quite beautiful mostly due to the great graphical engine of the game.

• Green means go, red means stop. Other very important feature of FPSs is their linearity. FPS designers and coders are lazy, and they don't want you to do anything exotic, just cover, shoot and resolve stupid puzzle. For this, there is only one path to follow, and they will make sure you don't get out of it. No, wait, my fault, there is only one path except for some "hidden" bonuses you can found here and there. Usually, this means that if you don't follow the incredibly obvious path with neon lights saying "smart people always go this way" and you divert through the ugly looking corridor nobody loves, you may find some extra ammo (...). And, as even level designers understand that sometimes their creations are too repetitive and tedious that players eyes' go on strike and stop distinguishing shapes, now they have started to use green and red lights (I saw it in Doom 3 for the first time, not sure if it's older). If a door has red lights around, it wont open, if a button glows green it's meant to be pushed. And not only that, these games usually come with a minimap that marks you where your next goal is. In summary, you don't even have to pay attention to the story or dialogs, shoot everything, go where the minimap says and interact with anything that glows in green.

• Story is expendable. The bad guy has gone to the past, blahblahblah, you have gone after him, tyranny in the past, a resistance, defeat the bad guy (oops!, did I ruined you the ending?). From the beginning of the game even your dog knows how it's going to end, and, as said in the previous paragraph, dialogs are also unnecessary with the minimap. Then, what's the point? Well, the shooting. Producers know this and they wont pay a salary for work that their 5 year old child can make.

• Weak science fiction. Let's start with a fact of the game. You travel back to 1939 to fight an army developed by Krone, who has traveled to some year before that one. All the models for Dr. Krone in the game are the same, so he hasn't aged too much in the whole timeline that the game follows, but, he has managed to revolutionize the whole war technology to the point that when you arrive, he produces futuristic armors and weapons, tanks, quads, Robocop like bipeds, cyborgs and futuristic flying ships, all of them at an industrial rate. Oh!, and he also has a skyscraper high spider like mobile assault station á la "Wild Wild West", which you defeat at the end of the game very easily. And Krone is not a military engineer, but a physicist specialized in applied physics. There is a way to solve this: Krone could team up with somebody in his first travel and show them planes to develop all this elements. Even with the difficulty of producing XXI century technology in the 20s or 30s, considering the poor effort invested on Timeshift's story, it's hard to believe they thought on all these details. It's also hard to believe that a computer can compute all the possible time breaks from the input of the suit you carry.

This may look like an exaggeration, but, in my opinion, this is an important problem with the science-fiction genre. Many people call this game science-fiction while it's not. To be science-fiction, there has to be an extensive scientific development of a fictitious idea, while telling a story. It's not enough to set a story in the future or in space or use some of the usual sci-fi topics like time traveling or teleportation. A good example of what am I saying is "Star Wars" that is usually referred as science-fiction. Well, it's not, there is no scientific development of any idea, there is no science at all actually but, it's galactic setting is enough to put it in the science-fiction genre. It's like calling RPG a game just because it features elves, dwarfs and/or orcs. Discussion

• Woman equals tits. Number of male characters in Timeshift: a lot; number of females: 1, which is naked most of the time. Do videogame designers have girlfriends? or female friends? are girls invisible to them? These are the sort of question that arise when playing any FPS. There are barely no girls in first person shooters and, when there are, they are always willing to show part of their big perfectly round tits. Maybe the answer is as pathetic as that designers don't want to make more than one human model, or maybe they see girls as something so cute that wouldn't make any sense in the violent videogames they produce, but in any case, thank you for making videogames an impossible chat topic when socializing with girls.

• One innovation at a time. And sometimes not even that, but, as tradition rules, any innovative game can only innovate in one slight feature at a time, while the rest of the feature should be the lowest common denominator in videogame standards. Usually this means an over-the-top graphics engine that no machine can run at the time (coughCrysis-F.E.A.R.-UnrealII-Far_Cry-anythingIdcough), but it can also be some tech feature like controlling the time. Of course, more than this will be banned from the producers, who know the important marketing rule that states that you can make more money if you innovate very slowly while waste tons of dollars advertising it as the best thing in years. If you have two or more innovations in the same game, they'll shadow each other, and each of them wont boost the sales as much as a lonely innovation by itself.
  
  The Bottom Line
  In summary, Timeshift is the same old FPS that you will enjoy because of its great graphics. Playing it would be the perfect definition of wasting time, you wont learn anything from it, your family will still believe that games are stupid violent toys for kids and recommend you to do something with your life if they see you playing this, if it's a girls who sees you (you are a man, by the way, which girls would consider playing this anyway?), your possibilities with her will decrease by, at least, a 20% percent, etc. Still, if you like FPSs you may have some fun with the game. At least, if you don't really enjoy it, you can always blame on it all your problems witting a review at Mobygames, :)

The Good
TimeShift is a fast-paced action FPS which gives the player the ability to have some control over the flow of time, as the title suggests.

Though you may have encountered some earlier games with some similarly like-minded concepts, e.g. Prince of Persia The Sands of Time, Blinx -- TimeShift is the first shooter game I am aware of that incorporates three time-altering play facets, here being: slow-time, stop-time and reverse-time.

The games’ premise is as follows; You are a physicist who is working on a Beta version of a special Quantum Suit which can be used to manipulate the flow of time. A co-worker of yours - A suitably ‘evil dude' one Dr. Krone, had some funny ideas about using the original Alpha suit to travel to an alternate time stream, where he would rule the world. Surely enough, this is what he has done, and you have to use the Beta suit to travel to Krone’s era, and put a stop to him. This makes for some bleak days indeed, but there is an occupant uprising going on, with some resistance fighters turning the tide on Krone, and his regime. You actively assist these groups of freedom-fighters, and with your advanced suit’s capabilities, leading the people to an ultimate victory of a world free of tyranny should all be in-a-days-work.

As for the majority of other shooters, the basic game-lay has you blasting your way through enemy-laden set pieces, collecting weapons and ammo, while completing simple plot-developing objectives. There are cut-scenes in dispersed throughout the game - being here short memory vignettes of the protagonists’ secret past.

Now for the big hook - your time shifting abilities. As I mentioned, you are able to slow down, stop and rewind time. The length of the cycle in which you can achieve these feets of time-law defiance is limited by the energy reserves of the suit, which has the ability to automatically recharge itself after use. While you are not directly affected by the 'time-shift', everything else around you is. Simple enough?

The first bullet-time component doesn’t really require explanation, as the tactical advantage it presents in combat situations should prove fairly obvious. The way in which this works is most closely like-minded to Monolith's F.E.A.R in execution. Interestingly, something a bit different is the ability to disarm enemies while they are in this state of time-flux. You can stroll up to them, and pinch their weapon(s). Subsequently they will exclaim “Don’t shoot, I am unarmed!”, but when you turn your back, they will immediately start for some chance weapon that is lying around. So mercy was never really an option.

The stop-time feature can obviously be used in a similar fashion, though it drains the power of the suit the fastest, so is less viable for tackling multiple opponents. It is fun to stop time when confronting a single enemy - Pump him full of lead, with a nice little touch being the blood splattering on your suits’ visor. Then watch the great rag-doll style physics in action as he goes flying skyward upon the time resume.

Last up is the rewind, which is by far the most visually arresting of the abilities. This brings forward some particularly exciting staged action sequences. Where as you may be casually making your way along some bridge, when it suddenly collapses under you! Hey, no problem. Just reverse time and the bridge will piece itself back together right before you eyes. You can then safely make your way across, just in time before ‘real-time’ recommences and it crumbles in your wake. Another scenario may be that you find yourself in some hot-water where you would otherwise be overwhelmed by the enemies - you can send them trudging backwards the way they came, then find suitable cover in order to be ready to face them on your own terms.

Other situations arise during the course of play which require one or more of these special features, such as bypassing security defenses, avoiding traps, safely passing through hazards and so forth.

Your suit also provides you with protection from harms way in the form of a shield. If you have ever played Halo 2 the method of implementation will instantly be familiar to you. No health bar is present, instead only a circular gauge is shown for the shield, which will deplete upon being injured. Taking cover on a regular basis becomes necessary to allow the shield time to regenerate. Furthermore, activating the slow-time will greatly accelerate the whole process, which is remarkably handy in the frequent heated battle situations.

Similarly like Saber’s first shooter effort - Will Rock, TimeShift has a good assortment of fun weapons. The designs are chunky and have a good level of detail, and generally look distinctively styled & interesting. But most important, are potent, easy to get to grips with, and are a delight to dismember the countless Krone guards with.

The machine gun/grenade launcher combo is solid, and the fact you can put a time delay on the alt-fire grenade to detonate adds some strategic value to the mix. There is a flame propelling gun - called Hellfire, which can be fired as an arc stream, or alternatively as a flamethrower which will barbeque the hordes into very crispy gib chunks to go. There is also a very cool sniper-crossbow with explosive-tip arrows, and also a more traditional sniper rifle is thrown in as well. You can only carry three weapons’ at any given time, so as to encourage you to try out the different toys’ which will crop up, swap & change along the way etc.

At some points during play, you can drive Quad-Bikes which was really a lot of fun. This reminded me a lot of some similar scenarios in Ritual’s SiN. The view is similarly from the first-person perspective. You can go tearing around some mountain pass, and run down the enemies, and jump across elevating bridges! These instances provided some of the most entertaining parts of the game for me.

In terms of visuals, TimeShift has grandeur to spare. The effect of pouring rain on the first level looks astonishing, especially when going backwards on the rewind! I was similarly impressed by some of the destructible set pieces - pillars, and decayed structural remains can be chipped away by gun fire, and the smoke haze & particle effects are completely topnotch. The frequent huge fiery explosions suitably look the business - especially if you slow down time for a closer inspection.

The Bad
Unfortunately general lapses in game-play, and some fairly rudimentary flaws directly affect the challenge, which subsequently affects the atmosphere.

The friends which fight alongside you aren’t blessed with special suits, though are blessed in the way they can’t be killed by oncoming gunfire. They charge along through the desolate burnt out war zones and are completely unscathed by the barrage of carnage. I suppose they could all hail from the planet Krypton. But moreover, this hardly does anything to further immerse you in the game world.

The problem afflicting the NPCs extends to the enemies. So often they will simply run into your outpour of lead, and do nothing to avoid your attacks. If you spot an enemy guard in the distance just obliviously standing around, and take a potshot at him - will he take cover? No. He will hold still until you have exhausted enough rounds to drop him. Unfortunately lure and kill tactics are all too easy to accomplish, even on the ‘elite’ difficulty, as the bad guys’ are scripted in a particularly ‘kamikaze’ fashion.

The objectives given to you in TimeShift often simply just involve activating some switch or lever(s) in order to temporarily open some door to the next area, which doesn’t exactly captivate the imagination - Even if coupled with integrating the time-shifting aspect. There are the occasional puzzles which require a little more forethought to solve in regards to employing your full-range of special abilities to render the solution, though it isn't quite enough to redress the balance.

Level design is strictly linear, and this leaves very little incentive for exploring the environments. Often there will be multiple doors presented or a path to an interesting area to negotiate which is always off-limits. Though you quickly find only one route will ever be open to you in any given instance. This “you can look, but don’t go” philosophy can often make your travels rather a bit ho-hum push forwards.

A factor which ultimately had an impact on the final product was I think partly due to the final management decisions - Opting to spend the extra year of development on superficial things like making the overall visual style ‘darker’ (opposed of the original steam-punk theme), and reducing the storyline to the bare-bones minimum for the result of suggesting that the player is conceivably supposed to feel like the person in the special suit. It is a shame the time wasn’t better spent on such things as improving the AI, and making the level designs, puzzles and objectives’ more involved and varied.

The Bottom Line
In spite of all those critical things back there, TimeShift very much remains worthwhile gaming. This is because the action is thick and fast, the weapons are particularly fun, and blasting the bad guys’ to bloody gib-chunks in slow-mo is as satisfying as ever. However, it is a little unfortunate some of the games’ execution feels like the long-past generation of shooters, and the time-shift facet isn’t exploited to full potential. All in all though, this is simply great stoic entertainment with truly first-class visual effects.

The Good
Timeshift captured me from the first few levels. At the beginning the whole setting and atmosphere reminded me a lot about Half Life 2. Indeed, the base of both Timeshift's and Half Life's 2 scenarios are very similar: some corporation has taken over and rules our world and the player impersonates a scientist or a person with special abilities that will relieve the world from these devastating and evil rulers.

Whereas Half Life 2 gave a more "sci-fi meets other dimension lifeforms" approach to the story, Timeshift takes the military grudge route. Roughly, our story begins in the present days when Dr. Krone creates a suit that can manipulate time as we know it and therefore whoever wears the suit can travel either back and forth, or stop the time! Two prototype suits were ever created: the Alpha and the Beta suit, which is basically an evolved model of the Alpha.

The player takes command of the fore mentioned special scientist who wears the Beta model. All of a sudden everything goes wrong, Krone steals the Alpha suit and the labs get blown to pieces, as you get transferred to a future era where everything, the whole world is under the influence and ruled by Krone, in devastating monarchy neo-fascism style, where every citizen needs to be registered and is surveyed. In those Krone regime times some people do resist against the monarch's fascistic ways. So the player is called upon to help the resistance and free the world of the presence of Krone, by using the special time manipulating abilities of the Beta suit.

Based on that special set of time manipulation abilities, Timeshift is a pure first person shooter in which the player fights off the hordes of Krone's loyal military groups. In aid of that fighting come the suit's time slowing abilities, in order to dodge enemy fire and to have a tactical advantage in the many situations where the player gets outnumbered. Furthermore the real value of the time manipulating suit shows up in the many puzzles of the game, where the "think in four dimensions instead of three" message that displays sometimes as a hint in the level loading screens is true. So basically in order to give a meaning to the suits existence the game designers have laid out many puzzles which the player has to consider the timing of events as well. These puzzles most often regard obstacles that you need to pass in order to proceed further, for example if you stop the time you can pass safely though fire or falling bridges, or if you reverse the time some elevator platforms that were going down are now going up, therefore you can jump on them and go to upper levels. There's quite a few puzzles scattered around in the levels that will give thinking breaks from the shooting main-flow. You have to be creative here and really think about you see happening in their reverse sequence in order to solve some of these puzzles. But the whole thinking process is mostly enjoying and doesn't distract or frustrate too much from the shooter game core.

The shooter core of Timeshift, is rather good making it an enjoyable shooter with weapons that generally give justice to the player, especially when combined with your time manipulation abilities. Situations become challenging often as the AI is rather smart, spots you early and uses cover techniques on the surrounding scenery more than actually exposing themselves to your fire, making themselves rather difficult to nail down, so tactical thinking is needed in order to survive here, but still the whole process is enjoying.

Apart from the time manipulation abilities which are definitely a great deal of help given the game design of Timeshift, there are many futuristic looking weapons for the player to use against the enemy. And as I mentioned before these weapons are generally give you justice and gaming satisfaction. For instance the game features a rapid firing shotgun which make it one of the best shotguns I ever played on a shooter. It's reloading time is rather long, but with tactical thinking the player will make really good use of it, unlike other games of the genre where a shotgun comes to actual use only a few times, mainly due to their extremely low rates of fire.In Timeshift the player is able to fire a full load in just a couple of seconds with devastating consequences to the enemy. Also many weapons have scopes which make them ideal for sniper tactics. The player is limited to carry only 3 types of weapons at any time and can substitute any one of them with another he finds on the levels. Therefore further tactical thinking is needed on to what weapons suit best the forthcoming situations. Apart from the array of conventional weapons the player has the ability to mount machine gun posts, laser turrets etc.

The audio visuals of the game are very good and imaginative, providing an enjoying playing surrounding. There's a wide variety of level types as the player travels through ruined cities, sci-fi labs, storage depots, mountains, forest and even gets airborne on a resistance operated blimp. The graphical novelty is kept high throughout the whole of the game. Noted is the 'Art-Deco meets 50's design' style machinery, combined with the powerful Krone's fascist propaganda symbols which maintains the dictator's authority, both of which are beautifully modelled and textured in the game.

The Bad
The first thing I didn't like about Timeshift is the lack of an energy display on the HUD. The reason for that being that when you get hit by enemy fire you have to seek cover in order to recover. For that reason the player will not find any medikit anywhere. I really don't like this technique in shooter games, but it seems to become a trend nowadays as the same health mechanics appear on Call Of Duty 4, Clive Barker's Jericho and Soldier Of Fortune 3, perhaps to a few others I haven't played too, but I would prefer to have a visual status of my vitality level.

Secondly the voice acting gets a bit annoying at times. The player is given tasks to accomplish, such as to find things, find and operate switches to open doors etc. for the resistance groups to enter buildings etc. So if you take your time trying to think how you will be able to reach the task's location the resistance commander that issues the tasks to you starts complaining every 10 seconds or so by repeating things like "Get a move on soldier" or "What are you waiting for?". The high frequency of those complains got in my nerves and at times I wish I had the option to turn the guy silent!

The Bottom Line
I have really enjoyed playing through Timeshift! It has all the elements of a successful and very entertaining shooter that doesn't boast to be serving you expensive seafood when you're really been served just a few peanuts. With that I mean that Timeshift is a straight and honest shooter, with nice graphics, smooth gameplay, a good story support, with a nice atmosphere and on top of all these the time based puzzles which will grind your mind enjoyably for a few extra minutes.

It never claimed to be a breakthrough or a pioneering game and never will, but it is still a very good and extremely enjoyable shooter that you can easily complete once and two or three more time in the future.

Well recommended, especially to shooter fans.