TimeShift

 

I don't know how I made it through this one. I'm going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off.

It's visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway through you get a crossbow that kills every enemy  in one shot. Combined with the ability to slow and pause time, this is basically god-mode. Even though it starts out kind of rough (lots of enemies, weak weapons), this one weapons eliminates nearly all difficulty in the game. There's four types of enemies. In the entire game. Everything takes place in dirty brick buildings. This is the most mediocre first-person shooter I have ever played.

This brings me to the crux of my disappointment in this game; its blatant disregard for the materials it centers itself around. This is a game where you play a nameless guy in a prototype time-travelling suit. Your boss takes off with the first prototype to go back to 1939 (???) and use his advanced technology to install himself as a Hitleresque fascist dictator. You take off through time after him only to have your prototype time-travelling suit damaged in the landing, which results in your quest to track down the big bad guy to get a piece off of his time-travelling suit to send yourself back to your own time. Along the way you help the local resistance overthrow their oppressors through your localized ability to pause, slowdown, and (sometimes) reverse time.

Okay, brain surgeons. When the bad guy, aptly named Dr. Aiden Krone (are you fucking serious?), takes his time-travelling suit to some random point in the past and radically alters the timestream that lead to the creation of his time-travelling suit, he creates a time paradox! Let's ignore that though.

So you have been building another suit through which to travel time. I guess if one time-travelling suit is good, two is better! You're violently thrown through time, and while you manage to mystically avoid reappearing in the timestream in a location free of materials dense enough to kill you outright, you're tossed like a rag doll into a wall that damages your time-travelling suit to the point of stopping you from further jaunts through time. From then on your suit is unaffected by bullets, rockets, exploding crossbow bolts, jolts of electricity, and balls of weaponized plasma.

In fact, your suit can still slow, pause, and when gameplay allows, reverse time! These are the skills you will absolutely rely on to survive your adventure to find Dr. Aiden Krone! These too, inexorably, damage the timestream and create paradoxes! When you reverse time to put yourself in a position you wouldn't be able to get to without reversing time, congratulations! You've just created a time paradox!

The story about what happened before Dr. Aiden Krone took off with his time suit is dribbled out in short (like 10 seconds) cutscenes that (often) interrupt the gameplay and occur with increasing frequency as you get to the end of the game. Apparently the nameless protagonist has been sleeping with one of Krone's female lackeys who has been leaking information on Krone's time suit to him. In the opening cutscene Krone disappears through time but not before he's planted a bomb in his old lab. The bomb explodes and you see the female lackey engulfed in flames and almost certainly dead.

Now spoilers follow but I guarantee I am doing you a favor if the story is the reason you're playing this. When you find Dr. Aiden Krone, he's piloting an enormous mechanical spider. Seriously. To destroy the spider, you have to blow up the plasma turrets on it's back and underside. With your guns. Once it comes crashing down you're treated to a cutscene of the nameless protagonist blasting Krone's brains out and taking the vital piece of the his time suit needed to return to his own time, which was helpfully taped to Krone's wrist. He returns to his own time with just enough time to see his lover destroyed, only to reverse time, disarm the bomb, and save her. In the absolute game's final slap to the face, the wrist computer on the protagonist's time suit flashes "PARADOX CREATED" and he flashes out of existence. WHAT??? In terms of the time-fuckery that this game commits, this is a relatively small infraction!

So here it is, don't play TimeShift. Especially if you've ever put a single brain cell into thinking about time travel. If you absolutely must play a first-person shooter, you can do much better but this will give you a weekend of "entertainment". Right now I'm trying to reverse time to prevent myself from buying this in the first place.