Quality Time: TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (Xbox)
What makes for a good multiplayer shooter?
You can try and have it where the guns can kill other players quickly to try and achieve some fast-paced action, but this can often lead to matches where you barely interact with your opponent and it’s practically a game of hide and seek but with lethal weapons. You can try and implement a loadout system where players get to pick which weapons they bring to the battle, but this can lead to the game centralizing around safe picks as you can’t really guarantee more niche options will be consistently useful in a firefight. There are ways to do both of those ideas well and some major first-person shooters have pulled it off by making the necessary changes to those concepts, but TimeSplitters: Future Perfect goes for a third option that has plenty of benefits even at its base level.
In TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, running into another player isn’t a death sentence, many weapons giving the opponent a few seconds to respond and fire back. The weapons that do kill quickly have some reasonable limitation to them that influences the user’s approach and requires good timing, movement, or skill to pull off without alerting your target. Your weapon options are exactly the same as every other player in the match, new tools acquired by picking them up across the map and so you’re never truly stuck with an inferior weapon and while you can be outgunned, if you grab that weapon yourself you could be the one with the big advantage next time.
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect has a strong batch of default maps, but with its robust mapmaker mode you can even surpass them in quality. It has a story mode with unique scenarios, but also plenty of additional challenges to be tackled solo and ones with plenty of rewards for taking the time to complete them. 150 playable characters, almost 50 weapons with many unique ideas rather than a batch of retreads, the ability to create your own story-styled missions in the Mapmaker mode…
But even with all these important and vital technical details that make this game such an excellent first-person shooter, leading with them feels rather wrong. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is a game where one mission requires you to keep cybernetic chimpanzees disco dancing by topping them off with your electric gun, so coming in and presenting a bunch of statistics and technical data doesn’t quite capture the whimsy, wit, and wonderful immaturity that gives the game such a distinct personality on top of gameplay excellence. So before I dive deeper into all the nitty-gritty details on the shooting, let’s first explain a few things about what this game even is.
WHAT IS A TIMESPLITTER?
That is, right there. Although depending on which game you play in the series, what that thing looks like and what its origins are can be quite variable. They do love to snatch time crystals consistently at least, but they are technically the series’s main antagonistic force as those time crystals are also what take the player across time to protect different eras from this unusual menace.
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect starts off with you in the far off year of 2401 where Earth is ravaged by a war with the TimeSplitters, almost looking more like Mars due to the desolation this skirmish has lead to. Despite this plight though, the game isn’t a very serious one and neither are its characters, everyone involved in the war effort of course invested in ending this ongoing battle but we’re not here to take some grim look at the toll of this conflict. Instead, we’re put in the boots of Sergeant Cortez whose eagerness to be the hero leads to a genuine enthusiasm that isn’t always shared by those around him. As he begins a trip across time to try and stop the Splitters and prevent the war from ever starting he runs into many helpful characters from other time periods, many of them who aren’t amused with his exaggerated mannerisms. He’s the kind of guy who keeps shouting “TIME TO SPLIT!” before heading out to the next objective even though most everyone who hears him say it believes it to be corny or unusual. While his endless energy for doing his duty never truly wanes, seeing him bounce off people who are of a much different temperament leads to many fun moments like when he and the ninja Amy Chen are infiltrating an enemy laboratory and forced to wait on an elevator, Cortez struggling to ground himself in a patient moment and making small talk that hilariously contrasts his usual bombast.
Cortez is hardly the only characters whose charisma gives the story plenty of memorable and endearing moments, the game’s main villain a perfect fit for Cortez. Jacob Crow is a scientist seeking eternal life and doing it in all the wrong ways, Cortez coming across many of his twisted experiments and evil plans as he tries to track Time Crystals across the past, present, and future. Jacob Crow is a character we see at many points in life, mainly because Crow ends up inventing a time device… or maybe not. See, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect isn’t too concerned about the logistics of its time-traveling plot, preferring to use it more as a cool way to take you to a 1920s Scottish castle as its being bombarded or a battlefield far in the future where robots fight the last vestiges of man.
One way it plays with time travel though is its loving embrace of time loops, characters often coming into contact with actions performed by other time travelers and later performing them themselves. In Sergeant Cortez’s case he often uses this to help himself out when he knows he’ll need it, the player receiving help from Future Cortez for a short while only to turn around and help Past Cortez on the other side of the event. The game does try to differentiate these moments, for example one segment has Past Cortez clearing out a group of zombies while Future Cortez is using special equipment to blast down ghosts only he can see and hurt, but there is at least one thing that makes this concept a little less thrilling that it should be. Only a short bit after you do these segments where you team up with your future self you will then play the role of your future self assisting your past self, the turnover a little too quick, especially since the same cutscene plays. There is almost a stability to Cortez assisting himself most of the time that is nailed in by those cutscenes being unchanged for the most part, but Crow is where things get a little more enjoyably ridiculous.
After spending a lifetime researching ways to avoid death, Crow ends up with a time device that he uses to go to the past and hand it to his younger self. However, later the young Jacob Crow heads to the future to ensure his future self gets that time device so he can pass it off to his younger self, the actual inventor lost a bit to a paradox in this process. This entire idea is presented as a joke within the story space though, particularly because of Crow’s over the top behavior and delivery. Not only does he gesticulate with a lot of energy and has a surprisingly malleable face, but he has some impeccable body language. When old Crow meets his younger self, he appears through time striking a dignified pose, trying to present himself as someone wise and distinguished. However that facade breaks as he starts explaining things, but later when you see young Crow visiting his older self to give him the time device, he’s striking that same pose and trying to look important and collected as well.
Cortez and Crow are made for each other in terms of being the ridiculous but not overly goofy leads of this plot, but there are other fun characters the story bounces them off of as well. The swinging late sixties super spy Harry Tipper leads to some fun parodies of old school spy tropes on top of the retro lingo he belts out to the “Spaceman” Cortez. The risque goth rebel Jo-Beth Casey, who was notably a glasses wearing schoolgirl in TimeSplitters 2 before her drastic makeover, puts Cortez with a teenager who is perfect for rolling her eyes at his obliviousness. While Crow’s allies in the plot aren’t quite there for their personalities, his minions do have fun moments like almost every level having a drunk soldier rambling about the current level’s scenario or holding a rally to whip themselves into a frenzy for killing Cortez only for the only image they have of him being him posing in speedos for a Mr. Universe contest.
The broader ideas in this time-travel story work and the minutiae isn’t nearly as important as the fun that brushing aside some rules allows to unfold, the many historical and future settings keeping the story moving to interesting new places for firefights, cooperative play if you have a friend who wants to join the fun, and even a few nonstandard forms of play like driving a tank, piloting an enormous mech, or using your temporal uplink’s tractor beam grip to grab goodies or solve small puzzles. Boss fights are often a bit easy admittedly but the usual gunfights can be both difficult and heavily varied thanks to enemy and area concepts like clearing out a haunted mansion of zombies, making your way through the automated defenses of a giant complex, or needing to repel both escaped test subjects and lab security at the same time.
Before we get to the gunplay I lead with though, it still feels important to hammer in how much this game’s identity does for it, so let’s move on to…
PERSONALITY
Like a quality romantic partner, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect does more than just give you a good time. While double entendres aren’t normally my wheelhouse here on The Game Hoard, this first-person shooter is teeming not only with that kind of irreverent humor but an incredible degree of attention towards its style and humor. Surprisingly none of the story’s levels are repurposed into multiplayer maps, the game wanting to take you to new places like the battlefields of Vietnam, a prison on Mars, and the streets of Venice. Carrying over levels from older games give you places like a Chinese restaurant and Mexican Mission to fight in, but the characters provide an even wider range of inspirations.
Sure you can play as almost every character you encounter in story mode, including character variations like Crow at different steps of his life and Cortez in different disguises he takes on to try and fail to fit in during different time periods, but you also get characters thrown in just because they can be. Perhaps one of the most defining parts of the TimeSplitters series’s identity continues on with the inclusion of a playable Monkey, the small little creature always wearing a silly expression with its mouth in an O shape and eyes open wide. However, we now have Monkey variants, with a zombie, cyborg, and ninja one. Monkeys are a bit of a normal choice for silliness though, but you also have playable fighters who are a giant duck man, a circus bear, a man with a hand for a head, and a snowman floating on a magic carpet. R-One-Oh-Seven is a human in cardboard box armor trying to pass for a robot, The Shoal is a floating school of fish with a pipe-smoking whale at its center, and there’s just an actual t-rex ready to pick up a gun and join in because why not? Of the 150 characters there are a lot more standard human characters so its not all wacky absurdity that might risk pushing the game a little too hard into such territory, soldiers, police, heroes from past games, and regular joes all filling out the roster. Maybe you’ll attach yourself to one of the members of Crow’s eternal life cult, maybe the simplicity of the Chinese Chef calls out to you, or maybe you’ll find one of the many robot designs appealing enough to pick, the game even shrinking down the massive Goliath mech that towered over you in single-player as a boss so you can use it for regular play.
For the most part, the looks of a character don’t impact things too much. There are a few things, a character ability system you can toggle to alter stats for example, but the main appreciable differences will be if they’re small or a zombie. Zombie characters can lose their heads and become almost immune to headshots for it while small characters like the monkeys are better at avoiding gunfire in general when most characters are of a similar height, but this also gives a means outside of the direct handicap system to give less skilled players an advantage in a gunfight. One fun feature of the wide slew of pickable characters though is what they do when you select them from the menu. Some characters, particularly pretty standard characters like Riot Officer or The General, will say something simple to show they’re ready. However, then you have things like the demented clown Mr. Giggles who laughs maniacally and asks if you want to see what’s in his pocket, you have Captain Ed Shivers rapid fire pirate taunts at you as he slams an anchor down, and the seemingly feeble scientist Doctor Lancet will throw himself to the ground and start spinning around while whooping wildly. Getting this small injection of unusual character can turn a face among the crowd into a new hilarious favorite, but there is one more thing to these characters worth mentioning that can be summed up with a question.
Have you played as Pulov Yuran yet?
The load screens in TimeSplitters: Future Perfect often urge you towards playing certain modes or completing content you haven’t finished yet, but oddly enough, the game leans on this mostly minor character as its load screen question quite often. Pulov Yuran is just one of many areas the game happily embraces the kind of risque humor teenagers would be easily amused by, but it doesn’t do so and then break to wait and see if you found it funny. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect sprinkles its double entendres throughout the experience and they come and go so quickly they don’t irritate while still building up the game’s irreverent tone. It’s not the kind of game that gets gross with its innuendos nor does it ever get too crass with how it delivers these jokes. Admittedly characters like the police officer Lieutenant Christine Malone and cowgirl Venus Starr basically introduce themselves by way of small stripteases with innuendo flying out the whole time, but the usual brand of humor is both not very subtle but not very brazen. Of course a mission about shooting watermelons is going to have fun with the word “melons”, or you might be told to use “big weapons” in a suggestive way for a different one. I’m not going to pretend it is high art or anything and many of them are more like building blocks towards the game’s joking nature instead of actually being funny in and of themselves, but by the game taking very little seriously it can instead try to find the fun wherever it can. After all, someone out there probably snickered at Pulov Yuran’s name, and by rarely dwelling on the jokes the player is free to find whatever they want amusing without being mired in something not to their tastes.
While that personality might be an acquired taste for some or even sound a bit worse on paper than it is in practice, the personality of the game definitely gives it a good bit of charm to layer over its superb gunplay. And now, having placed down the necessary details to ensure you don’t believe this to be some game that just handles its big weapons well, we can actually look at…
THE GUNS
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect features 45 distinct weapons, although there’s certainly an asterisk necessary there. The Temporal Uplink with its tractor beam is only used for story functions and challenges, the TNT is strictly locked to the plot’s events as well, and the nifty Time Disruption grenades that slow down the area they hit are wisely left out of multiplayer because one of the least exciting things to do to someone in multiplayer is to rob them of control or slow them to a crawl. That still leaves us with 41 distinct options as well as your fists that can be used if you’ve run out of ammo, and this batch of weaponry manages to have even automatic weaponry stand out from each other when in some games they might as well be interchangeable assault rifles with paltry differences.
First we should start by looking at the pistol options though since they are perhaps the least variable. The Pistol 8mm and Kruger 9mm are basically just strength variations, every gun able to deal heavy damage or even kill with a good headshot but these are differentiated primarily by power. However, we do already get a bit into Future Perfect’s approach to gun variety when we look at the other handguns. The LX-18 is so-named because of its 18 bullet clip, 10 more than those other pistols mentioned. Since all handguns can be dual-wielded, a person wielding two LX-18s can put out a hail storm of 32 bullets before needing to reload, although if you do manage to empty one gun and not the other you can actually reload it while firing the other weapon still. This usually requires a bit of trickery rather than a simple command to pull off, but it still makes the LX-18 an interesting option, one that is technically weaker than the other two but can make up for that as it can be fired rapidly and without as much worry about accuracy. The Scifi Handgun introduces the idea of alternate fire though. The other handguns go for adding scopes or silencers as their alternate options, but a Scifi Handgun can turn an enclosed space into chaos as its laser beams can be set to ricochet off the walls. It is more chaos than true tactic, but that’s what the opponent will be thinking too until a stray shot finds its mark. The revolver can ricochet a little as well, although this classic weapon differentiates itself by a slowly firing strong shots rather than sliding into the more common quick shooter archetype that makes for a good default weapon in the game’s weapon sets.
Moving up to automatics we have the machine gun that can be fired incredibly fast by holding down the trigger but can’t beat the slower but stronger fire of a Soviet Rifle. The Plasma Autorifle is a strong and fast firing weapon but overuse overheats it and leaves you vulnerable for a long time, but pop on the minigun and as long as its revving you have huge damage output and firing speed. The unlockable Monkey Gun takes it to absurds as firing once causes it to empty an entire 64 bullet clip in less than a second. Incredibly inaccurate but incredibly powerful, it’s a niche weapon and one that runs dry almost as soon as you get it, so something like the K-SMG balances strength and reliability better as it can be both a machine gun or grenade launcher with its alternate fire. The SBP500 is probably the closest you’ll get to a tame Monkey Gun though, firing incredibly fast but needing more bullets to kill than its absurd counterpart.
Moving onto other traditional but varied weapon types, you have the shotgun and Tactical 12-Gauge, both immensely satisfying weapons that can kill at close range with shotguns slower to fire but with possibilities of dual-wielding while the Tactical 12-Gauge can fire more before its time for its very slow reloads. Vintage rifle and Sniper Rifle both allow for long range pinpoint shots with varying damage if you don’t get the head for that instant kill, although the Scifi Sniper adds an interesting shakeup as it can put up an energy shield for a bit to help prevent against countersniping. Naturally you can’t use a sniper in close range too effectively or the shotguns from far away and hope to deal more than a tiny bit of damage, but an explosive shot from the rocket launcher or homing Heatseeker missiles only need to hit to potentially wipe out a foe.
We have got grenades in both standard explosive varieties and a sticky Plasma Grenade that attaches to foes before detonating that certainly was inspired by Halo, but we’ve got a lot more interesting and unusual weapons as we near the later part of this list. The Dispersion Gun is a shotgun whose power you charge up and can hit multiple foes, the Ghost Gun can sap life from enemies from afar with its long beam, the Injector doesn’t deal damage but if you land three needles in your foe they’ll inflate and explode. Grab some bricks to hurl for heavy damage from afar if you can line up the throw right or get in close with a bat to hopefully knock someone out before they can aim at you, or maybe try to be crafty by placing Remote Mines and waiting with the detonator when someone comes near. The Timed Mines probably aren’t the best for traps but you can toss them on someone’s face and watch them flail as they need to make their last seconds of their doomed life count, zap someone with an Electrotool or fry them with the Flamethrower with some weapons that don’t need to be aimed as cleanly, and if you think you can time it right the spiraling shots of a flare from the Flare Gun is an instant kill on hit even though it travels slow.
Admittedly there are a few weak weapons in the bunch. The Harpoon Gun has ammo you can collect after it’s fired but shooting it isn’t too great and ammo’s not really too scarce, any time Proximity Mines are in play they can be placed far too often and slow down the action as moving anywhere can become too risky, and the Mag-Charger is certainly the worst conceived of all the guns. In single-player it lets you use a heat seeking mode to identify danger ahead or find important circuitry, but in multiplayer that same heat vision comes with the ability to fire through walls and the weapon is too strong on top of having that ability that lets you shoot players anywhere on the map while they can’t even see you. The Mag-Charger is just a bad weapon idea… most of the time. Weapons in TimeSplitters: Future Perfect are never set in stone. You can go to the menus and change out which ones will appear in the level, and with the Mapmaker mode you can even design a level around a certain weapon’s use. The Mag-Charger can make the winding close quarters of some levels awful since someone can sit in a corner and kill everyone, but make a level where everyone has a Mag-Charger to start and it’s an enormous complex and suddenly the game plays in an entirely new and interesting way where dodging danger is done entirely differently.
Proximity Mines a bother? Turn them off! Is a Monkey Gun too strong? Have it only be a reward for players who go down a dangerous path in your custom made level. The mapmaker mode provides many options to make levels with multiple floors, a variety of themes, extra content like cars to drive, teleportation portals, death floors, doors, controllable turrets, and even a remote-controlled taxidermied cat on wheels named Strudel who was used in some racing missions but why shouldn’t you be able to place Strudel if you want to? The mapmaker is surprisingly flexible with its tile types and themes, and while TimeSplitters 2 was such a glitchy mess at times that it ruined certain modes and my brother was able to make an in-depth FAQ explaining the hundreds of little problems it had, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect’s main glitches let you do things like put more stuff in a Mapmaker map than you should or even do unusual tricks like make walls that are visible from only one side.
That customizability is an important thing not only for longevity in its multiplayer component, but it also plays into what makes this weapon set so great. Weapons are scattered around maps at set locations so if you know the level you can begin to make your way towards the good stuff, rewarding map knowledge. Utilizing the weapons properly requires some thought and ability, but the players and game-controlled bots you’re up against also have the opportunity to grab the same tools and use them against you, meaning there is a good balance but one that can be tipped by better aim or better finds. Armor, health, and pick-ups like speed, invisibility, or max damage can let you escape a battle and bulk up for the rematch, but no one player is granted these boons exclusively. Everyone is there to make use of the map’s bounty to their advantage, so while the Minigun is practically an unqualified amazing weapon, you have to go find it and make sure you don’t die while holding it since not only will you lose it on death, but an enemy can pick that gun up off your corpse.
A level’s design can be made incredibly exciting just by putting down the right guns in it, but even a standard spread can be made interesting provided there’s room to maneuver. Earlier I mentioned that there aren’t too many times where you won’t know you’re being fired at, and admittedly some guns like the snipers or rockets can kill you before you see them coming. However, you know those guns will always have the potential to be in play since the weapon sets are only a handful of available guns and even those can have some tells if they don’t hit you dead on. With many of the automatics though you can turn and fight back, even swapping between the various weapons you’ve found across the map to suit the situation. You could hurl grenades in a frenzy to scare them back, try to run in with a shotgun since it can kill in a single shot but only if you’re very close, or you can even just do your best to escape so you can go find something suitable for the next confrontation with that player. Mag-Charger aside nothing really feels unfair as every encounter has the same set of rules and it’s about what you brought to the table and how you can handle its use, and with different map designs like the open spaces of Disco and Siberia or the tight quarters of Bunker and Hotel it’s never just one weapon guaranteed to dominate all situations. Admittedly those maps even have spaces of varying sizes as well to keep the gunfights varied, but you can also make maps that embrace certain weapon types to really get the most out of the variety on offer.
THE EXTRAS
The Guns section there became a bit of a catch-all for the exemplary way the different systems involved in the first-person shooting hold together to make a combat system with near limitless potential while still feeling satisfying and personal even during the simplest encounters with your opponents, but I didn’t want to wrap things up without also looking at the many other nice touches TimeSplitters: Future Perfect has going for it.
The TimeSplitters series was actually started with a few developers from Rare splitting off to make their own development house, and while having a few people who worked on shooters like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark definitely meant some experienced people were on hand for making a fun console shooter, Graeme Norgate was also among them. The composer was able to give TimeSplitters: Future Perfect an excellent soundtrack on top of excellent shooting, Graeme able to capture different eras of history well with different sounds while also giving the game a memorable main theme perfect for mixing into other tracks along the story. The soundtrack provides catchy hits like Disco’s backing song or Spaceport’s techno dance music while also pulling back its instrumentation and leaning into the horror themes of places like the Mansion chapters of the story. You won’t be shooting each other to just the sounds of gunfire in TimeSplitters: Future Perfect as not only does the game feature plenty of excellent tracks, but you can also swap these out in the same way you do weapons, characters, and rules.
While the multiplayer is probably the strongest in its Elimination mode where it’s a last man standing battle with a lives system, you also get a good variety of modes to mix things up even more. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch make it a race to get a certain number of kills instead which can encourage more activity from players than Elimination, although Elimination also comes with the tension of being low on lives or playing safely since a death is felt more when it has more consequences than just another notch on someone’s part of the scoreboard. Capture the Bag, Bag Tag, Gladiator, and Zones are all modes focused on control, Capture the Bag about transporting enemy bags from their base to yours, Bag Tag about trying to hold onto a bag longer than other players but losing control of it on death, Zones having teams compete to claim a few different points across the map, and Gladiator having only one player able to score points with kills but killing that player turns you into the new gladiator who can go for kills. Some modes like Thief are a little weak, that just being a score-focused mode but you need to make sure to grab the coins people drop on death to score, but Vampire is an interesting twist on Elimination as you need to keep killing to avoid a death timer killing you instead so it removes some of the potential for hiding in that mode. Shrink and Monkey Assistant are focused more on aiding the losing players, Shrink having players who do well grow in size and those who have less kills shrink down to become harder targets to hit while Monkey Assistant has back-up appear for the player in last place in the form of a pack of monkeys. Most of these modes are there a bit more as curiosities if you need to spice things up in a game with already a lot of potential for variety, but Virus does stand out from them in that it’s about trying to spread a green fire from your body to other players if you’re “it” while they can use their guns to keep the infected away. Assault is also interesting since it lets you add an objective-focused mode of competitive play to a map, a bit different from story since there is an offense and defense angle for the players to choose a side in rather than the custom Story missions being about one player progressing through player-made scripted content.
To introduce these modes though the game makes use of the Arcade League, a set of small missions that ask you to do well at a round of one of these modes with set rules. Earning different ranks in these can unlock new content and getting a gold in some of these is a legitimate challenge, the game mixing up the conditions well and constructing little premises for these to make them more than just excuses to familiarize yourself with these other ways to play. However, the Challenges are where the game gets more creative, the cyborg chimp disco dance mentioned much earlier being one of the trials you’ll face in this mode. Some of these challenges really do live up to the mode’s name like the zombie survival themed ones, needing to stay alive in a small kitchen as reanimated cow carcasses run in in incredible numbers definitely not an easy task to complete. Some challenges are target practice that actually show that aiming on a controller can be done rather precisely if you’re used to it, and while the Xbox version is the one used for this review and the one that has more content in terms of things like music options and how many AI players can be in a match, I’ve played it on GameCube and PlayStation 2 as well and they all handle incredibly well. I’ll say the requisite “a mouse would aim better” as would a motion controller or even a gun prop, but TimeSplitters: Future Perfect accommodates your aim well and landing headshots or hitting those targets in the challenges are appropriately difficult but not because of the control methods at play.
Strudel races, smashing apart a level’s decor, and even a Temporal Uplink basketball minigame all pop up in Challenge mode, the game not afraid to change up the rules or introduce a concept just for a little bit of fun it doesn’t need to rehash too much. The high bars for getting gold in some challenges ensures you won’t blitz through the solo content either but even the harder ones feel within reach once you’ve become familiar with the game, so while the story doesn’t take too long to complete, the extra life these other modes grant and the ever variable multiplayer makes this a first-person shooter that’s easy to return to year after year.
IT’S TIME TO SPLIT!
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect makes sure to have incredible gunplay with a large set of well-realized weapons that can be balanced as the player sees fit, customizability both in options and through an amazingly flexible map maker allowing for incredibly longevity in its multiplayer component. However, while the blood flies and the weapons pack a satisfying punch, the game has an endearingly light tone which happily embraces ridiculous ideas that better fits a story based around time travel. The interplay between Cortez and the exaggerated behavior of Crow gives this game a memorable story and the abundance of playable characters even squeeze out some personality just with their introductions, and tossing in a legitimately challenging set of solo missions gives this game both the aesthetic charm and rich content that makes for an immensely enjoyable and surprisingly unique shooter.
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect could have probably rode high just with its choice of how to handle its weapon interplay. Being able to edit so many details of a multiplayer match gives the game more room to become a better personal experience for the players involved, and with the weapons often either requiring good set up and skill to kill quickly or encouraging a more involved back and forth between players since they won’t end fights too quickly you get truly interactive firefights. Different handicaps can keep even lesser skilled players in the match and poorly conceived ideas like the Mag-Charger can either be pruned out with ease or have something tooled around them to make them an actually interesting contribution to a level. The Mapmaker definitely adds hours and hours of potential to the experience as the building blocks not only already fit together in such varied ways but a map’s design can feel completely different just by throwing in the right weapons or pick-ups. Like many first-person shooters many of the extra modes feel like they’re there to shake off some of the issues that playing a game repeatedly can have, but TimeSplitters: Future Perfect has so many other ideas in place to keep the action fresh that having them in addition to all those concepts only sweetens an already excellent pot.
However, they do add to the Arcade League and also seem to fit right in with the game’s commitment to just adding in ideas it considers interesting. A player should be able to play as a cactus man, Aztec warrior, or one of those interchangeable soldiers they gunned down in the main game if they want to, and why not give that basic mechanic you pass by during the story a Russian dance to make them more than just a background face? It can get a little silly and its jokes that are almost too on the nose to count as innuendo can lean a little far at times, but everything seems to be here for the sake of a good time. Excellent music, an approach to weapons that make most of them great to use and balanced by the need to procure them in the battle, and a personality to the game that makes it more than just soldiers gunning each other down. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is the kind of multiplayer shooter that maintains its enjoyability because it both creates an enduring identity few can match and ensures the firefights can be so incredibly varied but still so mechanically sound that it’s hard to grow tired of them. It’s the kind of shooter that can stand the test of time because it carved out a spot if fits exceptionaly well, but the real perfect future would have been more games in the series to continue adding onto this wonderful template. It might not be possible to get a truly worthy successor to it now, but TimeSplitters: Future Perfect will still hold up on its own because it both lavishes the player in content while ensuring the quality of most of it. I’ll definitely keep coming back to this game for years to come, and with it being added to the Xbox backwards compatibility program it’s thankfully become much more accessible for future players looking for an amazing first person shooter they’ll keep coming back to as well.
