Timeshift
Ever since I heard about this game I thought it sounded like a very promising and cool idea for a shooter. Just imagine, I thought to myself, stop time steal all the guns from a crowd of bad guys and restart time and have all of them go “what the…”. It turns out my hunch was right. Timeshift is extremely fun.
The premise is that you are a Physicist working on a top secret project to build a suit that can travel through time. Everything is going well until one day the lead Scientist, Dr. Krone, steals the early alpha version of the suit and sets up a bomb to blow up the entire facility, including the beta version of the suit currently in development. Thinking quickly the silent protagonist of a main character puts on the beta suit and jumps (through time) out of the building before the bomb goes off. He wakes up sometime in the past, only nothing is how it should be. Krone has altered time and formed a new world. He attempting to rule the world through his knowledge of advanced technology and cannot be stopped by any normal man due to his time suit. You join the resistance movement and off you go.
The gameplay of Timeshift makes up for any other shortcomings in any other category. It’s just damn fun to play. You get to use three types of time control: time slow, time stop, and time reverse. You mostly will use time slow and time stop. Time reverse is rarely used in any sort of combat situation. (I played the PC version, so I’ll be referencing controls based off the keyboard.) You can assign each of the three time powers to a button (I chose Z, X, and C instead of using shift in combination with these) and you push another button for a sort of automatic choice time power (I chose T). For the most part you don’t really even have to choose what power you are going to use because pressing T chooses the right power for most situations. This generally applies to puzzles or stuff blocking your way. It also applies to combat with certain enemies, where T will stop time instead of slowing it. There are a variety of weapons including your generic machine gun with grenade alternate fire, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, a flame thrower/more powerful machine gun with less ammo, a crossbow that fires bolts (short arrows) with a detonation device on it that makes a person blow up when hit and a scope with different zoom levels (if you couldn’t tell this is my favorite weapon), a gun that lobs energy orbs and can charge up a energy blast, a worthless handgun, and an extremely cheap gun that you won’t see till way later in the game the kills most guys instantly. The gun that kills guys instantly shoots orbs of blue energy blasts that are more powerful that the other energy gun and the alternate fire sends out a constant beam of blue electricity which pretty much kills most guys instantly. It’s probably a good thing that they didn’t include this gun until later in the game because it is incredibly cheap. You can only carry three guns at one time and you can switch them out whenever you find new ones. Your current weapons carry over into every new area except the last one. My chosen three are the machine gun with grenade launcher, the crossbow (of doom), and the rocket launcher. This allowed me to have a fair amount of ammo for a close range weapon, a long range weapon that kills people no matter where you hit them because they blow up anyway, and a rocket launcher for large groups of guys or for when you want to have fun just blowing up one. There are ammo chests in select areas of the missions which will help you get ammo for a weapon if the guys in the level aren’t carrying it.
My favorite weapon, the crossbow.
Fighting soldiers is relatively the same. Slow down time, pop out from your hidy-hole or crate and shoot guys, then hide again and wait for your shields and time meter to recharge. However, fighting some of the other things in the game was a lot of fun. There’s a giant mech (read giant robot that a guy rides in with big powerful guns that kill you quick) that you have to avoid being shot by while running up levels of a building with destroyed walls by slowing time so he doesn’t kill you immediately. There are also a few helicopter fights reminiscent of shooting down helicopters and those weird living drop ship things in half life 2. The health is similar to halo’s recharging shield system where you have a certain amount of shield and when it runs out you die, but it recharges after some amount of time of not taking damage. I actually haven’t played many shooters that use the shield system (I know I’m out of touch and need to play more) but I have to say that it really helps keep the game moving. No searching for health packs or reloading a save because you lost more health than you would have liked to, or having to play a level over again because you needed way more health to beat a tough boss at the end. Also I should mention that the time powers aren’t too cheap because they only last a short time. I know I mentioned that I thought you would be able to stop time a steal a large group of guys’ guns, but in order to do that they would all have to be relatively close to on another and that doesn’t happen very often. Slowing time drains your time bar the slowest, then stopping and reversing. The puzzles are also pretty fun. They all involve using your time powers of course. There is this one puzzle with a rotating fan that turns like a water wheel and I thought you had to freeze or slow time to get through it, but I found out that you could reverse time to reverse it’s movement and have it push you through when I pushed the T button.
These mechs are found in several levels.
There are several vehicle sections in the game. One of the vehicle sections is where you are riding in a giant blimp with large platforms on the sides with gun turrets. Your job during this section is to shoot down mines in the air tied to balloons and later shoot down jets that fly by. You can still use your time powers here so it’s fun to slow time and shoot down the jets. It may sound simple, but I found this part a lot of fun. There’s also a later blimp section where you shoot down helicopters. The other vehicle section is where you ride an ATV. This section would have been more fun if you could actually control the ATV. The steering is terrible. If you barely bump a key to steer it moves so far over that it’s mostly unusable. I had to resort to tapping the gas a little at a time in order to steer. I tried using the mouse too, but it wasn’t any better.
The blimp with gun turrets.
As far as the graphics go my pc was a poor representation of good graphics because it’s old and slow (one of the reasons I’ll be getting a ps3 soon). I did get to play the start of the game on the ps3 at a friend’s house and it definitely looked good there. The rain effects in the beginning looked great. I liked how when you stop time, run up to a guy, and shoot him in the face, blood splatters on the screen as if it were on your mask.
