You don't need to pause or slow down time to realize that Timeshift sucks. But you may want to fast-foward through it.
+ The ability to slow, pause, or even reverse time is awesome.
+ Blood sprays on the screen during gunplay.
+ You can contort time in multiplayer modes, which is also awesome.
+ The framerate is really, really smooth at the beginning....
- .......and then it dies pretty much everywhere else.
- Lousy campaign that is by no means fun at all.
- Aversidic A.I., appearantly they have time powers too.
- Perversely painful difficulty, even on easy mode.
- Most multiplayer tricks ripped off of Quake 3.
- Graphics are so bland its like vommit.
- Story is almost non-exsistant.
- Tries way, way, way too hard to be original.
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There are alot of terrible shooters out there, to the extent that you may get the idea that the technicians behind the development weren't at all even trying. This unsurprisingly bad shooter doesn't shatter my windows. However, it takes a uniquely innovative type of "actrocious" to reach pass the 5.0 mark. In fact, Timeshift is such an advertable decison of a weekend blast that even if its flaws, big and little, where lined up to be shot in their temple at the cyle of the game's creation, the entire premise of this drabish cranable categorizies it self so drab and so unoriginal that even if it was completed, it'd still be a poor rip off of almost every other shooter on the market.
That ain't buying the lie!
In Timeshift...................ummmm...........I wonder what happens in Timeshift, because there really is no story. I can tell you this much: you play as some guy in a "TimeSuit" that tries too hard to look like Master Cheif, and for no appearant reason, he can control time with it. By the look of it, we're treated to the post-appacolypse stereotype -- you know, worn down buildings, soilders march the ground, and robots fly around in distress. Sadly, this part of the review explained alot more than what you'll actually find in the game. Its clear that the developers were trying to hit back at Half-Life 2 by leaving more questions than answers, and it ultimately struck one important question: "Why the hell am I playing this?"
Early in the game, your suit is modifyed to being able to control time that soon becomes essential to your survival. For instance, you can, with the touch of that popular 360 bumper, to temporaily mess with the time continuim. You may slow down time, completely stop it, or reverse it, and not just because you can. In situations where things get firey, you can slow down time, shoot the outnumbering foes in the face, and forward through time to watch the red stuff fly. Or you can kill a foe, hit the reverse button, and watch him slowly resurrect from the ground and start shooting again. The hook, though, is that the suit is charged by small time boost pickups that are often hidden in fairly crooky spots.
Unfourtunetly, that is the break of the entire game's far supieror brethen (like Half-life 2) and probably the very last coolaric you'll see in the game; everything else in the game is drabbed down to the half-hearted worthiness of a subverted Teletubby game. And that was NOT exageration in the slightest. The streets and buildings of the destroyed city you wonder around shooting soilders and tanks are all bland and look just so damn boring its not even secondly bareable. A stupid, wavy, sickening effect, persummingly some suspenser-intenser, occasionally coats the screen and makes it even harder to look at. Mission objectives insists killing and killing by going through a city, somehow entering a subway, then entering a library, an alleyway, and then, a green park that leads to a church. Its just random, weird, and perhaps, really riveting and repeatitive. Excluding some cool weapons like the shatter gun, most firearms are simple shotguns, pistols, machine guns, some rocketry bores, and so on.
The big star of the show is a shamelessly stolen crossbow (No way, how did they forget to add a crowbar and Gravity Gun!? Were the developers eating too many mushrooms!?! Green Mushrooms!?!?! They must have been eating some mushrooms!!!)
Then there are some pretty innovative uses of the engine, like where you need to stop time to survival a collapsing building or bridge, and switching on your flashlight to look in the dark is a great way to find ammo and time boost picks. And we go back to the bad, with the game's perversely painful difficulty, even on easy mode. Aversidic A.I. appearantly have time powers too as they always know where to find you and start shooting you after you use the time pause ability behind them. Imagine this: Pressing the Pause time button and running behind an enemy and forwarding time. Lets make a safe bet that he'll suddenly grab a rocket launcher and blast you away like a peanut wagon. You can die up to 20 times in one part of a level, either not knowing what you need to do (until you see you have to jump into a barely visable manhole) or just getting outnumbered by tanks or flyers. The zooming sucks, grenades do little to no damage, and your character runs as fast as a single-limbed pairie puppy with Osteoporosis. For any other developer that plans to rip off of Half-Life 2, they should learn the asinine mistake of this sliceable developer: The Post-appocolypse FPS is much more fun when you run faster than 3 miles per hour.
Multiplayer? Sure, Timeshift has it, but I wouldn't exactly call it "play" half as much as I would say "gut-stapling". No splitsceen for this one, instead the whole of the play is wasting time finding an online match that has merely "Average" connection quality, since every other one is usually low to the power of low. Matches generally involve running around at the aforementioned speed of a single-limbed pairie puppy with Osteoporosis, tying to shoot at some player who is like 10x better than you and somehow managing to kill you in one hit instantly while it take you 6 shotgun blasts to kill the little rat. You can throw special grenades that stop down time; Yeah, guess what the result is? Other players start throwing them all over the place, thus completly freezing time and giving them an unfair advantage to shoot you while you stand completly still. Fun? Not at all.
But really, how does this actrocious, headless heap of digital dumbness differ from some Quake and Unreal series? Get this, its because those games died, but this one didn't even make it for an hour before I returned it. Timeshift tries to resurrect Quake 3 by making platforms that make you fly up high, as well as special death traps and certain zones that slow down time (which makes you die even more humiliatingly). There is also a "Click! Click! Click! Click!" sound that keeps playing whenever you shoot another player, which is practical plagiarism to Quake 3. While the goal was probably to bring back the good old classic days, Timeshift just doesn't do it any favors and a few premates into its coresponding lacklustered gameplay reveals a half-heart game that should have never been made.
The only truely good thing I can say about Timeshift is that the shotgun beats the crossbow. Big time. You can almost afford to be cocky with the best weapon in the game, noteably the only good one. And it got that way because blood splatters all over the screen breifly if you shoot it up close to somebody. If I have been drastically unclear to this point in any way, lets make it clear that Timeshift is one of the worstly-challanged, half-spirited, derritives released between this decade. Oh ya, not to mention it totally sucks!
Saber had a good, fresh idea, but sadly they ended up creating one of the most disapointing Xbox 360 games available on the market. Its derritive in many spots, boring in others, and simply unfun. The next time a developer wants to try ripping off of Half-Life 2, they should forget anything having to do with stereotypically abysmal digital values and consider T-Shirts and Soda hats that corespond to a far spectacular piece of work. Anybody else should never be forced to play this game.