TimeShift (Xbox 360)

Many years back, I got my nephew TimeShift for Christmas, believing the mix of first-person shooting and time manipulating mechanics would provide an interesting experience for him to enjoy. However, when I checked in on how he liked it a while later, he sounded rather unimpressed with the game, and considering he usually seemed pretty positive towards most games he played, it stuck with me that this one hadn’t passed muster. It wasn’t really like he had a negative reaction to it necessarily, but I always wondered how it managed to come up short to what I expected of it. Only now am I getting around to trying it myself though, and as I played it became pretty easy to understand where my nephew’s perspective was coming from.

 

TimeShift kicks off when a lab developing a pair of time-travelling suits has one of its scientists go rogue, Aiden Krone stealing the Alpha Suit and heading to the past to alter history as he pleases. The player takes on the role of a nameless scientist who puts on the Beta Suit to pursue him back in time, but the Beta Suit lacks the ability to travel through time freely, the hero having to rely on an onboard AI that helps regulate what time powers it does have. Strangely enough, the time Aiden Krone fled to was in the 1930s, but with his knowledge of futuristic technology, Krone is able to jump society ahead decades. However, this technological leap comes with the caveat that Krone has become a powerful dictator who uses a giant mechanical spider and jetpack wielding gunners with electromagnetic rifles to rule over a dim urban landscape. In fact, the knowledge he brought back with him almost makes the time period the game takes place in irrelevant, since beyond a few things like the presence of zeppelins it could pass for something modern or outright futuristic.

 

While the setup is sound enough for a first person shooter, TimeShift really struggles to make its story compelling. The nameless scientist caught up in the action starts to work with the local rebellion to overthrow Krone and has many small victories along the way, but the generic through line of the plot that could have done a serviceable job holding things together is interrupted by a confused effort to give the hero a backstory. Random flashbacks that offer little information crop up, and when they are easy to interpret, it is usually because their purpose is to just hear other scientists reflect on how suspicious Krone is acting or how he’s doing independent work on the time travel suits. The personal relationships of the hero crop up but are seen in flashes with barely any context, making it hard to get invested since they’re crammed in between unrelated shooting missions. Besides the quest to stop Krone it’s perhaps best to push past the poor storytelling, especially since the culmination of the personal narrative still feels just as directionless and pointless as the moments it crops up along your adventure.

TimeShift follows the basics of a first person shooter of its time, the player heading through different areas and gunning down whatever enemy soldiers stand in their path. However, your opposition is somewhat tough, often able to eat a few shots from even your best weapons and able to dish out considerable damage if you aren’t taking advantage of cover and other evasive options. Using something like the Echo Rifle to snipe an enemy’s head or the Bloodhound rocket launcher to blow them to pieces is usually a one hit kill, but the chances to do so easily are few and far between and you’ll more likely rely on something like the Shattergun shotgun or the automatic Karbine to handle firefights. A few futuristic weapons enter the mix such as the Surge Gun with its powerful exploding electrical blasts or the fiery Hell-Fire weapon, and the Thunder Bolt crossbow rewards accuracy with a detonating bolt that can take out most enemies if it hits square on. Most weapons have an alternate fire that can make them stronger or fire something different like a grenade, and considering ammo distribution, it’s very likely you’ll settle into having something simple and reliable to fall back on like the Karbine while cycling through the more limited or eccentric secondary weapon options to handle the waves of enemies you face.

 

However, the main equalizer in TimeShift is not your weapon options. After all, your opponents all can wield the same guns, so you need something to ensure a Thunder Bolt shot doesn’t blow you apart or a Shattergun doesn’t catch you by surprise. The Beta Suit’s powers come in handy here, as the ability to manipulate time is a constant necessary part of the game’s combat. A recharging meter gives you the ability to mess with the flow of time in a firefight, the game either automatically choosing what it deems the best option when the button is pressed or allowing you to pick from your small selection if you hold it down. Slow motion is the most cost efficient and common power, the world slowing down so you can move around and fire shots that are unaltered by the changed time flow.  Stopping time completely is another possibility, this action much more intensive and usually best reserved for when things really become dangerous. Your health automatically recovers in TimeShift so long as you avoid enemy fire for a bit, but by freezing or slowing down time your health bar will recover significantly faster, meaning its best to flip it on if you’re under heavy fire. However, it’s almost always best to use your time altering powers the moment you enter combat, especially since it is so commonly leaned on as your only way to efficiently gain ground.

Enemy arrangements in TimeShift often cluster foes together and give them a degree of accuracy where you’ll need to slow things down and pick off a few foes before you’re overwhelmed. Admittedly, when you have the freedom to fill a foe with lead and then watch their body fly off into the air when time picks up again, it’s very satisfying. However, that satisfaction wanes as it becomes rather rote, most gun fights involving at least a beginning where you need to mess with time to hold your own. Even when you’ve got the most basic soldiers stopped in front of you, they all can take quite a bit of punishment before actually going down, meaning you’ll probably clear out two or three troops at best before time returns to normal. It hardly feels like an edge when there’s still five soldiers standing and firing at you after your power is used up for the moment, and while you can try to enhance these moments by doing cute things like plucking the guns from a time stopped foe’s fingers, dilly-dallying while messing with the flow of time is often going to mean the fire fight will take longer since you weren’t as efficient as you could have been. The game begins to roll out enemy types that aren’t just men with guns too, and most of these almost outright require some time trickery to even hit effectively. Men on turrets turn far too quickly and seem to resist grenades with unusual effectiveness, jetpack troopers seem to avoid most shots save those where you aim carefully in slowed time, and the helicopter battles are tedious even with you slowing down time to launch rocket after rocket into them. When the game adds time troopers who use the powers themselves, you basically have to always slow things down or stop them to get your shots in, and so the core gimmick of TimeShift becomes so prevalent and straightforward that it loses its novelty. The shooting is still decent and the weapon variety and level of challenge keep it entertaining enough, but with every firefight being about using your slo-mo and suffering if you don’t, your time powers feel less like superpowers and more like just a way to remain competitive.

 

The areas you visit during your adventure do serve as good stages for the gun battles and transition well into multiplayer maps. The city has a good mix of tight indoor areas full of cover and open streets where foes can drive up in vehicles, the player even getting to drive around the countryside at points and man the turrets on a zeppelin along the way. Large warehouses, enemy encampments, and places like a prison and the city rooftops keep you moving through new locations that mix up how the opposition is placed. Sometimes your time powers crop up in small puzzles and hazard avoidance too, your time reversal power almost strictly meant to be used for such occasions. If a bridge you’re crossing is breaking apart, you can turn back time to safely cross it, and if an automated turret it watching a hallway, you can freeze time and walk past it. These are pretty straightforward setpieces that don’t excite too much, especially since a few of them have immediately lethal consequences if your time meter drains before you’re done or you mess up a little in something like driving through a minefield before the explosives have time to trigger. The brief injections of variety aren’t often painful, they’re just a tad uninspired since the solution is always to press the time-altering button and then move on.

 

Multiplayer, back when it was reasonable to find a game, takes the time manipulation in an interesting direction though. Since serverwide time stops could slow the game to a crawl or become tedious, instead your time powers are tied to grenades, the explosives creating a bubble of altered time after they detonate. Rather than just pressing a button to trigger your powers, you now need to aim it well to stop enemy bullets, slow them down to fill them with lead, or even reverse dangerous situations like a sticky grenade being stuck to your own body. Whether its the kill competition that is Deathmatch or the objective stealing of Capture the Flag, the already fine shooting feels like it benefits from a more skill-based approach to activating your extra powers, especially since you need to collect the time power instead of just getting granted it for free like in single-player. Two of the modes even hinge heavily on the time grenades, King of Time having players fight for a point where your time manipulation powers are null but you’re exposed to many lines of fire from approaching opponents and Meltdown Madness being a battle to sabotage the enemy’s machine by messing with it by way of Chronos Grenade. These ideas aren’t enough to help the game overcome its overall mediocrity, but clearly a lot more thought went into how time powers could influence multiplayer play, the single player certainly needing more cases where the challenge isn’t just to slow time to shoot enemies or stop time so you can walk away from a time bomb your character sets for two seconds just so it’s a danger if you don’t active your suit’s abilities.

THE VERDICT: There’s a sound shooter at the heart of TimeShift and one that can even be challenging at times, the weapon variety giving it a good enough mix of options for how you handle a firefight. However, the time manipulation enters the picture and starts to homogenize many of the skirmishes, the need to almost always slow down or stop time, open fire, and then hide as you wait for your time energy to refill to do it again leading to a pretty standard approach to action. Your time powers are constantly relied on but aren’t really the canvas for any sort of creative approaches to the gun play, usually just slowing things down to make them manageable or making it possible to overcome some straightforward hazard or special enemy type. The time grenades of multiplayer do add some layer of skill to how you mess with time, but most of TimeShift is about fairly basic gun battles that have their moments because of level layouts and the difficulty, but also have plenty of slow parts as you need to slow time to gradually pick off damage sponge soldiers.

 

And so, I give TimeShift for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. While my nephew didn’t say much about the game, what little he did say seems to come through after playing the game. It’s an alright first person shooter, just not an impressive one or something that will stand out. The time manipulation gimmick somehow feels underutilized and constantly vital, the need to trigger it to stand a chance against accurate and durable enemies meaning you will be doing it often but the execution of it so basic that it doesn’t feel like the kind of flashy power it appears to be in the game’s cinematic attract mode demonstration. You won’t be mowing down six or so guys with the gun you yanked from the first one, and climbing aboard a tank to fill it with grenades is purely a fantasy of the cinematic scene meant to get you hyped for a power whose uses are rather cut and dry. It does try to make use of them beyond battle, but the limited scope of your time powers also mean you can’t do too much interesting with them. You can reverse a recent bridge collapse, but you’re not going to be staging intricate take downs of foes with the knowledge moving through time freely could afford, especially since most of your time in slow motion or frozen time will be unloading on one or two basic soldiers or gradually chipping away at the stronger foes.

 

It’s important to reiterate that the central gameplay is fine and the first person shooting hits the required marks to be decently entertaining, but when your mechanic meant to help you stand out turns out to be rather plain, the straightforward shooting has nothing to spice it up. TimeShift isn’t quite generic because it can lay out some good gun fights and the weapons are interesting tools, but the gimmick that was introduced to that solid foundation messes with the balance a bit too much. You can’t succeed in TimeShift without the powers, but the powers can sometimes drag out moments despite their shaky implementation and thus TimeShift lands in an unimpressive middle ground that couldn’t hope to compete with plenty of contemporary first person shooters that handled their basics or distinct elements much better.