Want a unique First Person Shooter with cool time control abilties? Then look a bit further.
The games plot takes place in the not so distant future, where scientists have put most of their resources into time travel, which evidentially spawns a breakthrough. The Alpha Suit and the Beta suit, both capable of creating a rift in time and allowing the wearer to jump to any time period. The director of the team that created the suits, Dr. Krone, becomes the tester of the Alpha Suit and jumps backwards to 1939; there he changes the events of time and makes himself the ruler of the world. The player then takes the role of a nameless protagonist who must follow Krone and stop him from taking over the world. The Alpha Suit, being experimental, was incapable of anything but time travel, whereas the Beta Suit had combat capabilities and an onboard AI, which would prevent the player from creating a paradox, incidentally the lack of the AI is what allowed Krone to cause the events of the game in the first place.
Time travel is always a very tricky thing to take on in any form, the premise on moving forward and backwards through time and how certain events could influence history is an interesting and exciting concept for anything; be it Television, cinema or video games, however it's a very difficult idea to tackle. Timeshift took a massive leap with its time idea, which is a very gutsy move; shows like Heroes are a great example of how it can be done correctly, by pre thinking every possible outcome to any decision; Timeshift however could have had so much more of an impact. In other medias, the creators will preset certain events and have characters act a certain way, having the control over a character in this circumstance is a very exciting idea; if the player didn't kill that one character in the first level, could they have become a fully trained bodyguard to the end game boss, if that one building wasn't destroyed, could it now be a stronghold for the resistance against the communist leader. Sadly, in Timeshift, everything is in fact preset. The game follows a set path, events happen and cannot be changed by the players choices, which is a huge shame because that could have saved the concept and brought a fantastic idea forward for future titles. There will always be risks in games design; concepts, ideas, anything that can be unique is most likely going to be shot down by the public unless it is truly incredible; thusly Saber have to be given some credit for at least trying to take on time travel in a video game, which has been dabbled in before, yet never been the whole Unique Selling Point of a game in a serious capacity.
With other titles such as Bioshock, Crackdown and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare all having been released in the same year, there are certainly no excuses for weak graphics however Timeshift seems to have certainly let fans of the genre down with its visual style. With incredibly buggy looking characters, poor environments, awful voice acting and lack of diversity, there's great difficulty in trying to find positive aspects of a games graphics that look very outdated. This is the case for every aspect of the game besides rain, looking at it ordinarily is incredible, looking at it in slow motion is incredible and watching it rise into the air in slow motion is even more amazing.
The controls of Timeshift are relatively similar to most FPS games, a trigger to fire, a trigger to zoom, and other abilities such as jump and melee assigned to buttons. Funnily enough, most games tend to use a combination of the D-Pad and Shoulder Buttons to be the unique power, Timeshift is no different. Each power having been assigned a direction on the pad and the shoulder button to trigger it the player will feel a comfortable relation to the control system, which is a good move frankly. When a game genre tends to universally use the same control system and button layout, it becomes much easier for an interested gamer to pick up the game pad and play whatever the game is; Grand Theft Auto for example has created a very simple and easy control system, when Saints Row was released, most found themselves confused at first, especially when having to switch between the two games, thusly Saber made the correct move in using a traditional control layout for Timeshift.
The problem with First Person Shooter's is in their success, players will always buy FPS based games because they're exciting; they give the controller a certain power which is unique in each game. In Metroid the player can control a powerful bounty hunter who can run at fantastic speeds and fight aliens, in Call of Duty the player can be an important solider in an epic battle to win a war, and in Timeshift, that power is in the name, the ability to control time. This, as previously mentioned, is a great idea if done the correct way, however all the power that is given to the player in Timeshift is certain temporary abilities, such as slowing down, rewinding and even stopping time, which is incredible for the first five minutes of using it, however beyond that the game becomes what every other FPS is, a hunk of meat running around with a gun, shooting generic solders. This works as a base; Medal of Honour, Halo, F.E.A.R and Half Life are all excellent instances of successful and renowned First Person Shooters, however they all have their own unique aspect to them which make them enjoyable, Timeshift's was supposed to be the time abilities, but if the player has ever even seen a game with Bullet time, it will feel all too familiar and boring too them, and even if they haven't, after having to play a six hour campaign of doing the same thing over and over again, they will do.
With a generic reskin of every other First Person Shooter on the market, the mundane and weak unique aspect of time control and foolish Artificial Intelligence, common knowledge dictates that the story would be a strong aspect of the game, however the very lengthy plot of a man chasing another man across time is as good as it gets. Generally if there isn't a sub-plot to the journey the main character is going on, then there will be a big reason as to why this person is going so out of their way to settle what seems like a personal vendetta, however Timeshift lacks this. All that is known of the characters is that they work together, it seems like anyone could have done the job that this unfortunate person has been lumped with, which incidentally makes the player feel like what in actual fact every First Person Protagonist is; a lump of meat with a gun. On occasion the player will shift locations and move somewhere else, this will happen without any indication or explanation on the most part, simply moving to different environments because the player has reached the point they were supposed to, which isn't fulfilling at all, in fact becomes incredibly tedious after an hour of running through a war torn environment to randomly be teleported to a snowy mountain range, the thought that crosses most peoples minds is why couldn't that have happened sooner.
Looking past the single player, the multiplayer aspect of Timeshift is generally overlooked, with traditional death match style games there's a lot of room to enjoy the online side of Timeshift. The control over time was an aspect of the game that had to appear in the multiplayer, which sounds like a confusing concept to put into a real time online situation. The addition of grenades which creates an orb where it lands of 'time energy' is how the powers appeared, when anything enters this orb, they slow down dramatically, which is a very clever addition, sadly however the community of people is very low, meaning this interesting multiplayer will be missed by many gamers.
Generally graphics and story should not be essential to the success of a game, however when that game is a clone to several other First Person Shooter's, they are important. In this case they were a let down, as was the time control. Nothing is as such bad with the game, as there isn't with every other FPS, however the unique powers that could have made the game a fantastic title seemed unfinished, so much more could have been done with the game, which sadly lets the title down.