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TimeShift

The Half-life of an Innovation

Many gamers will feel right at home as soon as our hero appears in Krone's corrupted version of history. Timeshift makes no secret of the main influence behind its design: the dystopian setting, a lone hero with a high-tech suit that gives him superpowers - there's a very piquant taste of Half-Life to TimeShift. Even the Steam Punk styled environmental graphics design, with boiler pans and regulators, has more than mere shades of Valve's masterpiece.

Some of the references border on plagiarism, though. Dr. Krone speaking on a large monitor, trying to placate the masses that grow restless under his tyrannical rule, could just as well be a shaved, bespectacled Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2. Even the game's weapons bear striking similarities to Half-Life's: the automatic carbine has an underbarrel grenade launcher, and there's a crossbow for long-range sniping. And let's not forget that the unnamed protagonist in TimeShift is a research scientist, just like Gordon Freeman.

Original or not, at least TimeShift follows some very successful formulas - not to mention the almost universal appeal of superpower fantasies. Have you ever wondered what you could do if you had the power to stop time? The trailer shows just what a decisive advantage that would be in a fight, and more impressively, you can do the same manoeuvres during gameplay. Facing a dozen enemies armed to the teeth? Pausing time for a moment, grabbing a gun out of a frozen bad guy's hands, and shooting a bullet at each of the enemies solves the problem in half a jiffy. When time resumes its flow, all the enemies fall down at once and you've won the day.

Of course there are limits, otherwise the game would be no more fun than beating Doom in god mode. You can slow down time for just a short while, and pause it for a shorter time still. Time reverse is the most strenuous time-bending activity your Beta Suit can do, and you can only travel backwards in time for ten seconds or so. You need to reverse time to solve some puzzles, and to get sticky explosives like Clutch Grenades and Thunderbolt arrows off you before they blow up.

Take control of time, but only when we tell you to

Although confusing enemies and grabbing their guns is fun, TimeShift's timeshifting leaves a lot to be desired. The game wastes an opportunity to make some mind-bending puzzles and plot developments. I would have loved the opportunity to "think in four dimensions", as the game's premise urged me to, in more contexts than gunplay and simple puzzles involving obvious obstacles. TimeShift is a much more straightforward shooter than its idol Half-Life, as there are practically no adventure game elements to it.

Wow, that was a close call! It's a good thing I am the master of time itself

You're not alone, as rebel forces will fight with you - for all of two seconds before they die

The suit's automatic smart control system, S.S.A.M. (a reference to another classic FPS game), both helps you choose the right time manipulation method for many of the bigger fights and puzzles, but also prevents you from timeshifting during many scripted events to prevent "time paradoxes". Although it's understandable that some of the game's scripting would have been impossible to pull off if the player could pause or reverse time in certain situations, and the developers should be commended for trying to maintain the suspense of disbelief by introducing the possibility of a paradox-detecting computer, the game pulls the time paradox card way too often.

With these very limited time manipulation capabilities, the whole concept of timeshifting becomes much less exciting than it could have been. If you're looking for an adventure in space and time, you'll be disappointed in TimeShift. There's no freedom of movement in any dimension - instead, the game is a straightforward scripted shooter with no branching, and console-style on-rails sections only strengthen its linear feel.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Gameplay and MechanicsPage 3: Single and Multiplayer CarnagePage 4: Hardware and PerformancePage 5: Summary and Scores

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