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
The graphics: To me, the graphics were great. They felt like an real Playstation 3 game for me. Sometimes jaggies will appear, but this isn't distracting. Everything is rich and colourful.

The gameplay:

The gameplay is very enjoyable, especially the multiplayer part, where you can play online. During the game, so called fire fights will appear, in which you have to slow down the time. I find this a bit annoying, since i like fast paced action.

The Bad
The sound: Well, the music isn't anything special, there isn't much music. So do the effects, there are some basic gun sounds, grenade sound and shooting sounds.

The story: I find the story a bit hard to understand, because there isn't really a big story in my opinion at all. You play as a mysterious physicist who created special suits for controlling time. One of them is stolen, and you need to find it with your own suit.

The Bottom Line
It's and enjoyable game. The story is quite confusing, but fans of this genre will like it.

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.