TimeShift

"Like a Steven Seagal movie, but better because there's no Steven Seagal!"

TimeShift will most likely be overlooked by many, especially on PC and Xbox 360, because it came out in the same season as Unreal Tournament 3, BioShock, Crysis, Assassin's Creed, Halo 3, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and Call of Duty 4. At the end of the day, not many people had the money or time to give this game a go as well. What you'll find when you play through is an addicting, short-but-sweet, adrenaline-fueled FPS action game with some easily identifiable flaws.

The game's story features two physicists, you and a man named Krone, who were part of a team of scientists working on two time-manipulating suits, Alpha and Beta. Krone takes his suit back to the 1930s along with some future technology, allowing him to rule the world with superior weapons. These suits give you the ability to pause, rewind, and slow down time. If you say it sounds like Prince of Persia, you're partly correct. Though Prince of Persia gives you the ability to slow down and rewind time, the rewind feature is one of the least used features in TimeShift, and you can't even use it the same way. In Prince of Persia, it was pretty much used to correct mistakes, but in TimeShift, you can use rewind to send explosives back at the enemies that threw them while you are free to move around in the process.

This time manipulation, if it wasn't obvious by the title of the game, is one of the main focuses of the gameplay. While the majority of its uses revolve around making you a superhuman compared to the bad guys (who actually have good A.I.), there are some interesting uses that can be applied as well. For instance, two types of enemies have time powers as well, making it crucial that you use your own time powers to defeat them. The other use of time powers is for the various puzzles. For the most part, these puzzles consist of only a few different, self-explanatory types. Once in a while though, a really intriguing puzzle comes along, making you wonder why they didn't try to come up with more puzzles that unique.

The other way this game manages to innovate, other than some beefed up versions of standard FPS weaponry, is with very destructible environments. The problem here is that not everything that looks destructible is destructible. When in the right environment though, the game's a nice sight to behold. As for the game's multiplayer, the weapons are more balanced for facing other humans, and time manipulation is done entirely by grenades in most gametypes.

The graphics are decent in some spots but they won't win any awards for TimeShift's looks, and the game will run on pretty much any machine made in the past 5 years. My biggest complaint is that there's no built-in option for anti-aliasing to smooth out the graphics. It was even very noticeable at a resolution of 1600x1200, and forcing anti-aliasing through nVidia's software wouldn't work either. Still, seeing as this game runs really well on half-decent hardware, I'd recommend you pick up the game for PC rather than Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, especially for mouse support.

Overall, TimeShift is a really addicting single-player experience in spite of some very noticeable flaws: no anti-aliasing, not all environments are destructible, and puzzles can be borderline lame. It'll last you a few days (took me a little more than 7 hours to finish) and it's a great ride.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/07

Game Release: TimeShift (US, 10/30/07)