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When I first played TimeShift at E3 2005 I was told by the creators of the game that it would be an Xbox only title, well a few publisher shifts, design changes, and over two years later, the game has finally found a place in next-gen on Xbox 360. It got a facelift, you control time, and it has a lot of interesting things going for it, however the elements that it combines to create the game can be overdone, or not done very well at all.
As the title suggests, you can control time, thanks to a “Beta suit”, the suit, covering your entire body making the person in the suit anonymous and giving the illusion that you are the person in the suit, similarly to the mysterious Master Chief in Halo 3. You must go through time to stop Dr. Krone, a scientist that stole the Beta suit from the facility he was working on for time-traveling purposes. As you jump through time you soon discover he is now in control of a dystopia world. Immediately, this dystopia world, Krone blaring on screens throughout the city, and a rebel force against a totalitarian evil will more than coincidentally remind you of Half-Life 2, where it obvious has drawn a lot of “inspiration”. The similarities don’t stop there either, as there are even ammo boxes lying around, and some of the weapons, such as the crossbow weapon are similar. Borrowing ideas from arguably one of the best first-person shooters of all time isn’t a bad thing, after all, BioShock, one of this year’s greatest titles did it, but not only that it added on to the element it borrowed. The same can’t be said about TimeShift, which even with its time element fails to be interesting in most aspects.
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These guys got trouble coming ahead.
Without time in fact, the game has a very feel to it as any other shooter, except without any interesting elements. You have a kind of ion cannon that decommissions enemies well, the crossbow, an almost automatic shotgun weapon, pistols, and more. All the weapons, even the shotgun seem to have a incredibly unrealistic amount of range, and even at the hardest difficulty you will find that it is hard to run out of ammo, even with the more powerful weapons, taking a lot of the challenge out of it. Shots and melee hits sometimes don’t connect, as they should either, which probably goes along with the uneven AI as well. At times, the AI will simply stand there and look right at you, or also for example if you have a lot of enemies in one area, you can hide behind cover, and wait for them to just walk right on by and shoot, without having to dodge at all.
The time element does add another layer onto the gameplay, but it feels far more like a gimmick in most instances, unless there is some kind of puzzle involved. You can stop, fast forward, and rewind the time during combat, but typically you will want to go forward so you can get the drop on your enemy. As you do this, you will see blood splatters slowing down, rain drop to a trickle (or halt if you pause time) and chunks of concrete columns fly around as if though they are feathers, as you move around finding a good position. Explosions are pretty cool when using time powers, as they are slowed down, and as you go along you get the hang of managing your time, which you can only use in bursts then regenerate, and gunplay. There are other little cool instances when the time powers need to be used, such as walking on water, dodging projectiles being thrown at you, or walking on a giant spinning propeller of a downed airship. Probably the coolest is reversing time to get a stuck grenade off of you, something that I wouldn’t mind having in more than one match of Halo 3 multiplayer. There are also instances when you are behind the turret of an airship or armed vehicle that you can slow time down, and that can make for some interesting moments.
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