Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Review - Timeshift

Playing around with time is a fantasy of anyone who has experienced an 8 AM class, or anyone else who has to do work (aka everyone). Timeshift looked to be the answer to those prayers, just replacing lectures on chemistry with shooting stuff, which makes it a lot more awesome. There was great potential for this game, but what I got instead was a cheap imitation. It works well and you get your use out of it, but it’s not something to show off to friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll say from the start that Timeshift is a good, solid game, and I enjoyed my 10 hours with it. It has everything you want from a FPS: good graphics, cool guns, fun battles, and abysmally dumb A.I. to make you feel like an indestructible killing machine.


As a whole though, it feels all too similar to many games out there. While I’m not a big fan of the game, it seems Halo was on the developer’s mind when making the rechargeable health, weapon carrying limit, radar, sticky grenades, and almost every other part of the game. The one part that was semi-new (only being inspired by Max Payne, F.E.A.R., and every other action game since The Matrix) was the time altering abilities of slow, stop, and reverse. It was definitely fun using stop to sneak behind enemies, or to dodge away from bullets last second, but after awhile that’s all you do. You don’t use the powers to do much else, except for the occasional puzzle which is only outmatched by the first level of Portal.

Normally a good engaging story and purpose keeps you going through mediocre gameplay, but I won’t even try to sum it up in this review since not even the game did a good job at presenting it. All I know is that I went from setting to setting without giant walking spiders like I saw in the first level, completing simple tasks by myself when my “team” stands around guarding a door from the corpses I just laid waste to.


To wrap this up, Timeshift is not a bad game. If it came out during the summer drought I think it would have seen a lot more sales. But when compared to the loads of great games to come out in recent months, this will sadly end up in the bargain bin. It has high production values and you will have some fun playing it, but too many “been there done that” emotions overshadow the few great moments in this game.

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