The jewel of Free Radical's Sci-Fi shooter series' crown
In contrast to Timesplitters 2, Future Perfect is based around one character, Sergeant Cortez.At the beginning of the game, he is leaving the space station that he destroyed at the end of TimeSplitters 2. His ship crash lands on Earth and two fellow marines greet him. He takes the time crystals he retrieved from the space station to the General who uses them to operate a time traveling machine created by scientists. In order to prevent the present from ever happening - a time in which TimeSplitters plague the world - Cortez uses this machine to travel into the past to destroy the source of the time crystals (used by the TimeSplitters for time-travel) effectively preventing the war between humans and TimeSplitters from ever happening. Cortez goes into several different time periods between the 20th century and the 25th century, befriending and aiding various characters (including himself) in their fight against villains. After discovering that the creator of the TimeSplitters is a mad scientist named Dr. Jacob Crow, Cortez embarks on a new mission to foil the scientist's plans by destroying his labs in a game of time tag. Cortez eventually succeeds in preventing the genetic manufacture of the original TimeSplitter army Crow planned to use, and goes on to destroy both Crow and the time crystal mine, as well as prevent the assassination of his past self.
Future Perfect allowed for online play on both the PlayStation 2 (up to 8 players) and Xbox (up to 16 players via Xbox Live). Unfortunately, recently EA Games shut down the servers for both systems.In addition to Story mode, the game features co-op play and four player arcade. The Mapmaker feature allows players to create levels for multiplayer and Story mode. There are a total of 150 characters for arcade playability. 67 of these characters are unlocked by default. The remaining 83 must be unlocked by completing the numerous "Challenge", "Arcade League" and "Story" levels. Unlike previous games in the TimeSplitters series, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect's cross hair is set so it is always visible. This feature can be turned off in the options menu. This is also the first TimeSplitters game to-date that features blood and gore. Don't let this put you off though. As I said earlier, everything is cartoony and so nullifies the gore to a smaller level.
This game may be approaching its 3rd anniversary, but it is still a fantastic game with a sublime plot, slick gameplay, and razor sharp wit. This is the sort of game you bought your PS2 for.