A hell of a lot of fun to play, but the campaign is way too short.
+ At first this game seemed like a mishmash of other successful games. Bioshock, Dead Space, Metro 2033... But then it picked up and started to form a personality of its own. Unfortunately, it ended before I had enough to truly enjoy the experience.
This game is essentially a first person shooter but you are only allowed to carry two weapons at a time. Even though there are only half a dozen weapons, I still would have liked to carry at least three weapons. You can choose between a pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, machine gun, sniper rifle, and grenade launcher. Pretty much all of them feel good in your hands and are effective. There are also two weapons that you can pick up temporarily: a rocket launcher and the Seeker. The Seeker is a real cool weapon where you fire a bullet and then the camera follows its path through the air and you are able to guide it to hit an enemy. It's a lot of fun to use but there are only a few instances when you encounter it in the world.
You can also find weapon upgrades throughout the world and either improve the reload time, ammo capacity, or damage output. This system works a lot like Dead Space and isn't that hard to grasp. But be careful, if you find all the upgrades you will only be able to completely upgrade about 3 weapons, so decide carefully.
The real interesting part of the game comes with your TMD (Time Manipulation Device). Once you pick this up you are able to shift time on certain objects, including enemies. This sort of works like a plasmid would in BioShock (if you are familiar with that). You have a meter which controls the power of your TMD and recharges over time. If you use the TMD on an enemy, it will make him age quickly and turn into a skeleton and then it will drain some of your TMD meter. If you use your TMD on world objects it won't drain your meter. It's a lot of fun to play around with and it even lends itself to some interesting puzzles where you have to shift between past and present time states for objects.
Your TMD also lets you pull and throw objects similar to the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. This is not only useful to grab objects from a distance, but you can also grab enemy rockets in mid air and toss them back. The TMD can also create a projectile pulse attack that can blast enemies and will drain your meter. Finally, you can charge up a sphere and then throw it. This sphere will stick to a surface and expand. Everything in this sphere will slow down for a brief period of time. You have to use this sometimes to overcome world obstacles, but you can also throw this up in front of enemies, shoot a whole bunch of bullets at their head, and then once it vanishes the enemies will get railed with an entire swarm of bullets and will die. This gives you time to shoot a whole bunch of bullets at a number of enemies, then side step out of the way so none of their bullets make it through and hit you. Tactical and fun.
There is also a currency that you can collect and upgrade other parts of your character like more health or being able to carry more health packs or health packs being more effective. Again, this is similar to BioShock.
While you can't have both a gun and your TMD device up at the same time, it is really quick and easy to switch between them so combat is fluid and easy. If your TMD is up, just tap right click to aim and your weapon will reappear (or you can even left click and you will start shooting). If your gun is up, just tap Q or E for the TMD powers and you will switch to your TMD.
Finally there's just one last thing I'd like to mention. If you tap F it will show footprints on the ground of where you are supposed to currently be going. I found this to be a small feature that really came in handy but not for the purpose intended. Most of the game it's clear where to go, but there are certain spots when there are side paths. In most games it's hard to tell which location is a side path that contains some special items and which is the proper path to continue your objective. If you ever get confused here, just tap this button and you can say "Oh, okay well here's where I'm supposed to go, but first I'll go check out this other place to see if I can find any cool items." A real nice touch in my opinion.
Story/Presentation: 3.5/5
+ The story is okay. I wouldn't go so far as to call it great, but it's enjoyable. It seems to draw heavily from BioShock and Metro 2033. Even though it does have its own uniqueness to it, I couldn't help feel like I was already familiar with what was going on. It does play more to time manipulation and going back and forth in different rifts. The characters seem really flat though and it's hard to care about them. Plus the fact that you don't spend enough time getting acquainted with the world and environment, it's really hard to get attached to anything.
Graphics: 4/5
+ The graphics are decent. They definitely aren't spectacular but they are good enough to enjoy. Some things could have obviously looked better, but this clearly looks and feels like an Unreal engine game.
Value: 2.5/5
+ This is just devastating. The game lasts around 6 hours, maybe 7 if you're really pushing it. And I wasn't even rushing, I was trying to search every location to find all the items to upgrade. I was severely disappointed with the length because I was having so much fun playing the game and I wanted to keep playing.
It does have a multiplayer option but I'm pretty sure the lobbies are dead at this point. I'm not sure how much time the developers devoted to multiplayer, but if it threatened the development of single player I cannot fathom why they would have included it. Leave the multiplayer out and just make the single player longer and more enjoyable. Games like these that try to include multiplayer lobbies die out so quickly, but a single player campaign can be enjoyed forever.
In the end, this game is loads of fun but soak it up while it lasts because you can beat it in just a few hours. If it goes on sale for cheap, grab it. Otherwise don't waste more than $20 on it.