After being in development for seemingly forever, TimeShift is finally out on store shelves. But was the wait worth it? Yes. Absolutely. TimeShift is a solid game that looks and plays remarkably well. The time shifting aspect of the game could have used more work, but the core shooting is fun enough to make it worth playing even after the wow factor of the time controls wears off. Make some room in your holiday game release schedule, because TimeShift should not be ignored.
Quick Hits
- Title: TimeShift
- Platform:Xbox 360
- Publisher: Sierra
- Developer: Saber Interactive
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: First-Person-Shooter
- Pros: Nice graphics; solid FPS gameplay; time controls are cool; multiplayer
- Cons: Time puzzles and set pieces repeat over and over; story doesn’t make much sense;
Features
The single-player campaign in TimeShift has you playing as a scientist working for a company that has created time control suits. One of the suits is stolen and used for evil, so you jump into the only other suit and try to track the villain down. From there, the story starts to get pretty murky and it is hard to know just what the heck is actually going on. It is still fun, even though you don’t know what is going on, but it is really all just an excuse to shoot stuff which TimeShift does very well.
No FPS these days should be without multiplayer, and TimeShift has a surprisingly good setup. Standard modes such as deathmatch and CTF are present and accounted for, but now with time controls, which make things just a bit more interesting. The time changing aspect of the game is available through special time grenades that create a sphere where bullets and people and anything else move in slow motion. Getting caught in a time sphere is a bad thing. The core gameplay is solid on its own, and that combined with the time aspect make for a pretty enjoyable experience that has a fairly different feel from the other Xbox Live shooters.
Gameplay
SierraThe gameplay is what ultimately brings everything in TimeShift together, and I’d have to say it is pretty darn good. The core shooting is very sharp and smooth, which makes using all of the different weapons at your disposal really fun. The core shooting and exploration feels a lot like Half-Life 2 in the enemies you are fighting and the strange booming voice being broadcast over loudspeakers as you try to flee a city and the groups of freedom fighters that see you as a hero. But unlike HL2 which has so-so shooting but great puzzles and atmosphere, TimeShift has great shooting but only so-so puzzles. Where TimeShift tries to mix things up is in the time controls, and while they work just fine, they puzzles and set pieces start to repeat themselves fairly early on. You have the ability to slow down, stop, or rewind time, and the use of these abilities is governed by a little meter in the upper left corner of the screen. Thankfully, it recharges fairly fast, but it makes the game a bit boring by the end because it all just devolves into this: go into slo mo, kill as many enemies as possible, run behind cover to recharge the time controls, repeat. You can do some pretty cool stuff with the time controls such as taking an enemy’s weapon away from them, walking on water, or rewinding time to before a tunnel collapses. But by the third level or so you have already seen and done it all. It is still fun, of course, but when time controls are the main hook, I just expected more out of it than we got.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, TimeShift is a nice looking game. The environments you explore are nicely detailed, and everything has that shiny “next-gen” look. Special effects for water, rain, and fire also look really nice as well. The characters look okay, but the animation is very good and the way enemies fumble around looking for a weapon when you take theirs away in slo-mo is pretty cool.
The sound is pretty average. The music is decent and the weapons are nice and loud, but the voice acting is flat.
Bottom Line
SierraIn this crowded holiday season of ‘AAA” shooters, TimeShift is, unfortunately, likely to be lost in the shuffle. But it is a solid game in its own right and I highly recommend that shooter fans check it out. There really isn’t anything bad about the game, but at the same time, there isn’t anything that stands out either. The time controls are supposed to be the main hook here, but you can’t really do enough with them to make that aspect of the game truly shine. TimeShift is just a solidly put together, nice looking, fun game that, while not rising to the heights of BioShock or The Orange Box or Call of Duty 4, is still a very good game that deserves to be played. Give it a rental at the very least.
