TimeSplitters 2 (Xbox)
As a first-person shooter with time travel as part of its DNA, TimeSplitters 2 would already benefit from a wide range of possible levels, characters, and weapons, but as a sequel it also benefited from its place in time in real life. The first TimeSplitters was a PS2 launch title that only allowed two player multiplayer and had a story that was more a linked together set of missions than a plot, but as Free Radical Design’s first game it laid important groundwork for a follow-up that could expand its offerings. TimeSplitters 2 would offer the same quick first-person shooting gameplay as the first but with more refinement and options, and by expanding to hardware like the GameCube and Xbox that allowed up to four players to join in, the multiplayer component would be an even more robust and entertaining element.
Funnily enough though, despite putting more work into the story than the previous title, it is still presented in an odd way. TimeSplitters are a group of alien creatures who seek to use Time Crystals to alter the past to gain an edge in their war against humanity, but Sergeant Cortez and Corporal Hart have tracked them down to the space station where the Splitters use those crystals to enter a time portal. Cortez begins to hop through time to retrieve the crystals from different periods of Earth’s history both past and future, Corporal Hart presumably accompanying him if you play the story in co-op with another person. The reason I say “presumably” is because when Cortez travels to another time, he actually inhabits someone from that time period rather than walking around as himself. The degree to which he is that person is hard to determine though. In the first level, Siberia, he appears to completely replace Ilsa Nadir, but in the often humorous cutscenes that introduce levels, you’ll also get moments like secret agent Harry Tipper talking with great familiarity to his arch nemesis Khallos and sometimes while the character still clearly has their normal personality during the cutscene they’ll already be after the Time Crystal themselves. It ultimately amounts to little how this habitation of a pre-existing person works and the scenes with very animated characters that introduce a time period with an appropriately thematic moment of action or dialogue are still an appreciated element.
In story mode you’ll find yourself in places like 1930s Chicago, a far off future where the Robot Wars rage on, an alien planet with a civil war, and the Wild West, ten levels taking you to a new location each time that will have different weapons and worries. While gun men and automated turrets are pretty common adversaries as you explore these time periods, there are also unique forms of opposition and puzzles to be solved between the gun fights. In a place like Aztec Ruins the Stone Golems can only be killed by using a temple’s traps against them, and while boss characters are usually easy to chew through with automatic weapon fire, you can still find impressive boss battles like the one against the Machinist’s death machine and the usual path through the level will still put up a strong fight thanks to limited health and armor pick ups. Levels usually have a fair few objectives beyond just advancing down the expected path forward, and while you need to pause and read an objective list to find out what you’re even meant to do in a stage, there are different types of play like stealthily tailing a gang member in Neo Tokyo or trying to figure out how to bust your ally out of a jail cell in the Wild West stage without any hands-on help from the game in regards to providing you the solution. The story ends up more interesting to participate in because it isn’t just a series of spaces to shoot at enemies in, different objectives and moments that test your intelligence or planning spicing up the adventure. Even if you fail a stage the process of coming at it again with a new plan of action can be satisfying since they aren’t too long once you understand them, although if you choose to play on Hard mode to try and unlock the last multiplayer level Site you’ll find stages have more objectives added to them on top of much stricter limits for failure and higher damage, the strategies used shifting to overcome surprisingly impactful adjustments to a level’s goals.
Story mode isn’t the only meaningful and enjoyable single-player content in the package either though, as the Arcade League and Challenge mode both provide a huge set of missions to play where earning gold will help you unlock more stages, modes, and characters for the multiplayer component. Arcade League takes the multiplayer options and adjusts them into challenging formats to test your ability to adapt and combat situations often deliberately skewed against you. For example the Virus mode where players who aren’t on fire try to avoid touching those with a sickly green flame becomes much harder when the bots will target you specifically and the usually team based mode of Capture the Bag will often have you with only one ally up against a well-armed enemy team to try and steal and claim their bag. Some of these are definitely more indulgent ideas like having a rocket launcher to start and trying to blast a huge amount of AI controlled opponents away before time runs out or participating in one shot kill matches, but these also serve as a good way to introduce the player to less standard modes like Monkey Assistant where losing players get assistance from gun-wielding monkeys, Gladiator where only one player can score but can have that status stolen if they’re killed, and Assault where certain levels take on special forms where you have to complete objectives and push past the enemy team to do so.
Challenge mode has more creative twists to how you play though, freely introducing new rules and concepts rather than simply constructing interesting matches from the available assets. Trying to find the best path through a level to collect all the bananas, testing your aim against moving cardboard characters, standing your ground as undead come in greater and greater numbers from all sides, and smashing up all the glass in familiar levels prove to be surprisingly strict in what they expect for a gold trophy and thus more involved and interesting than if the task was a one and done affair. TimeSplitters 2 generally manages a strong balance between needing to understand what you’re up against through failures that don’t set you back much but ensure that finally hitting the mark you were aiming for proves immensely satisfying, the word Challenge certainly not used lightly. Even before looking at the multiplayer component TimeSplitters 2 has a good degree of unique and diverse action to sink your teeth into that ensures greater longevity by pushing you to truly learn the shape of a challenge to overcome it.
However, multiplayer is perhaps still the game’s strongest mode. When you’re up against AI controlled opponents you’ll notice they have dodges and slides that are unavailable to human players that helps make up for their lower capabilities for advanced planning, but at the same time to offset any unfair advantages the AI are also capable of flinching when shot so you can interrupt them as needed to complete objectives or not get overwhelmed in competitive matches. In multiplayer though every player is on an even level unless you turn on handicaps or character abilities that influence speed and life bar sizes, but human players can make much greater use of the weapons and level designs. TimeSplitters 2’s weapon set manages to span the past, present, and future, but its guns are able to appear in the same spaces as well if you so wish and even old guns can hold their own against future tech. A Tommy Gun’s rapid fire is quick to kill in any era while the charge shot of the Laser Gun will either require you to have had it ready and burning energy in advance or space out your shots to get the charge needed when you find a foe. The Plasma Autorifle fires very quickly and can even launch sticky plasma grenades onto a foe, but its shots fly slower than something like the modern Minigun’s incredible bullet output. A crossbow may seem humble until you realize you can light its arrow with torches in the level to ignite an enemy and the raw strength of a close range shotgun or tactical twelve-gauge shot makes them a satisfying tool in a map with a lot of close quarters. The pistol offerings are admittedly quite weak and they’re often the default weapon in a match because of it, the goal being to find something stronger around the level to better hold your own. The two sniping options are also a bit less likely to see use outside of dedicated story and challenge scenarios, their incredibly touchy aim while you look down sights making it hard to utilize in the fast-paced action of multiplayer battles, especially when more standard assault rifles or rocket launchers can usually hit anything in sight even at a distance.
The weapons still provide quick killing tools that make for frantic and exciting multiplayer battles where a confrontation can be survived if you move intelligently but won’t last too long if the stronger weapons are in play, but the maps play a very large part in the shape of the conflict as well. Areas like Ice Station and Scrapyard provide huge open areas with limited cover but a few small spaces to journey to looking for good pick-ups or respite from the onslaught outside, but in a smaller level like Compound you’re never too far away from another player and the abundant cover leads to a fight with a lot of weaving around tight spaces to try and avoid your end. Some maps like Circus try to mix and match tight and open spaces and Chinese is a restaurant where windows might prevent players from reach each other but not shooting at each other, so the potential for different weapons to thrive on top of drastically different level geometry ensures there are more experiences on offer than just killing in a location with a new coat of paint. There is even further potential to be found within the game’s Mapmaker mode, the player able to make custom levels of their own that won’t have the same unique architecture of the game’s stages but can come in different themes like Industrial, Victorian, and Egyptian to still have visual variety. Each tile set also has a unique large room that the game put care into making into its own mini-level essentially, but by placing hallways, ramps, and open spaces across multiple floors connected in the way you like with the weapons you pick, you can make new spaces that embrace different ideas to keep adding more life to a game already packed with a lot to do.
TimeSplitters 2 has a wide range of characters to unlock as well, some from the story given fun personalities and others just wild concepts. With both the past and future to pull from you get characters like ancient explorers shooting at robots, but the game isn’t afraid to just get wacky either as men with hands for heads, enormous ducks, and even a snowman riding on a flying carpet join the battle, some like the Monkey smaller and thus harder to hit in a match but mostly it provides a wide range of interesting characters to select from. Similarly, the game is packed with a lot of unique music, Graeme Norgate composing in a variety of musical styles that can both evoke a time period and pump players up for action. The loud jazzy sound of Nightclub gets you ready for a level where you’ll be turning corners and finding gunmen regularly while Ufopia’s sci-fi eeriness can still maintain a strong action beat. The Industrial tile set theme can actually be rather beautiful at parts and Wild West manages to make memorable melodies out of the expected period-appropriate instrumentation, the soundtrack often exceptional at setting an area’s identity or tone while still providing a good musical backdrop for the frantic fire fights.
Unfortunately, while TimeSplitters 2 has constructed a wonderful balance between its map design, gun concepts, and a shooting style that can sustain strategic challenges while still maintaining a quick pace, it does have a fair few technical issues, to the point my brother once compiled a huge list of glitches for it over on GameFAQs. Most of these are small visual issues or rare occurrences thankfully and during the particular play through of the game I did for this review few were encountered, but in some levels like Chasm, a multi-tiered complex with bridges that will lead to instant death if you drop off them, the number of potential issues can harm the level’s appeal. In Chasm falling off those bridges can mess with the scoring in Deathmatch and lead to wildly low negative points, and in general falling off a ledge even when there’s ground below can sometimes cause you to lose two lives instead of one. The sound of the Lasergun and Minigun charging up can get stuck playing, and the Capture the Bag game mode can have players score by dying on the capture point while holding the bag even if their bag is stolen and they’re not meant to be able to. These issues do seem more common in the GameCube version though and there is a still a wealth of content to be played where no impactful glitches will occur, but it is a shame some modes, weapons, and levels can have an error impact how often you might be willing to risk running into them.
THE VERDICT: While its glitches aren’t well hidden, TimeSplitters 2 still manages to provide a phenomenal first-person shooting experience because of how well everything still works both in design concept and the pace of play. Firefights are exciting battles as the weapons provide a good range of options in levels that suit them well, but Mapmaker allows you to expand that synergy even further to expand the lifetime of an entertaining multiplayer component. The main story and the numerous extra single player missions give you much more to do, their unlockables making them worth doing on top of them providing tests not only of accuracy but of puzzle solving and strategic development. Excellent music adds to a mix of ideas that manage to make multiple ideas throughout different time periods somehow gel together solidly when occupying the same space, a good balance of unbridled creativity and playing into the expected ideas of each era making for a first person shooter packed with interesting content.
And so, I give TimeSplitters 2 for Xbox…
A FANTASTIC rating. While this game’s own sequel, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, would polish away many of the glitches and even refine the balance of weapons even further, TimeSplitters 2 still has a high amount of unique content to offer to make it worth revisiting. TimeSplitters 2 has a comedic bent that makes its somewhat confusing approach to time travel easier to stomach, especially when the scenes introducing a level have so much character to them. Similarly, the characters, while essentially interchangeable in a firefight for the most part, are designed with a wide range of ideas and silly concepts, the game not wanting to take itself too seriously and even naming many challenges with puns and innuendos. Serious moments do feel a little out of place for it, but the intensity of play can still rise up in multiplayer matches that get heated due to weapons and map designs allowing for intense skirmishes or challenges and story maps requiring more involved planning and action. You may be playing as an Elvis impersonator or inexplicable Beetleman in such moments but the approach to gun play means management of your life bar is important and so you treat an encounter with an appropriate degree of weight. In story this means learning how to carefully approach an objective, in challenge mode this means learning the unique shape of the trial and how you can hone your approach to earn that gold, and in multiplayer it becomes about knowing how to utilize or avoid weapons in a specific map to survive while also making sure you can defend yourself appropriately if your back is against the wall. In the moment it will still usually come down to holding down the trigger to fire, but the considerations around it both strengthen the impact of those moments of battle without interrupting the exciting speed of the action, and with some superb music in the background to maintain such energy, TimeSplitters 2 is a more layered first-person shooter that remains accessible even for a quick bout of simple play.
TimeSplitters 2 manages to improve on the original game’s design while also not being totally invalidated by the sequel that would improve on its own issues, but those issues were mostly in regards to small things like the glitches and feasibility of weapons like the sniper rifles. TimeSplitters 2 still has an excellent array of single player content to ensure it holds value even for a person who never touches on the multiplayer, but that multiplayer also gets an expansive amount of options as well as the room for customization through Mapmaker to make it a shooter worth returning to for match after match. A solid foundation and the room for expansion benefits most of the experience as you can embrace the excitement of an energetic FPS game in the multiplayer and find a more focused and tactical set of challenges in solo play, TimeSplitters 2 able to not only blend different time periods into a varied but cohesive experience but also mix together the many ways to play a shooter as well.