TimeSplitters is a series I’ve never had the chance to really familiarize myself with. The first group of titles basically offered something of a generic run-and-gun gaming experience (albeit with a bunch of cool custom settings and unlockables, as well as some nifty bot support), and at the time the lack of a cohesive single player campaign didn’t really make me excited about playing them. Of course, now that I have a job where I basically get free games thrown at my head for a living it’s a little harder to ignore a potentially fun gaming experience, and as such I was more than open to the concept of reviewing Free Radical’s latest contribution to this long-standing FPS series, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. Promising a single player element that has an actual storyline for once, an insane amount of unlockable goodies and customizable content, versatile online gameplay, and even a freaking map editor to boot, I was left more than a little intrigued at the possibility of checking this game out.

The story takes place far in the future, with humanity tangled up in a war with a race named (oddly enough) the “TimeSplitters”. Unfortunately, the good guys aren’t exactly winning the conflict, and the last hopes of the human race rest with a soldier named “Cortez”, who’s been sent out to retrieve a collection of “time crystals”. The crystals are meant to be used to power a time machine to send a soldier into the past to prevent the war from ever starting, but while preparing to land, Cortez’s ship is shot down and he ends up caught up in the middle of an all-out TimeSplitter assault. After fighting his way to the nearby base, Cortez is quickly set up with a “Temporal Uplink” and shoved into the time machine to save the Earth before it’s too late.

The premise behind TimeSplitters: FP is a little more interesting than most, but the game ultimately sets itself up as something of a generic run-and-gun shooter. What makes TimeSplitters such a special game in my eyes however is the execution. While I was admittedly a little skeptical at first over how much fun this game could actually be, I soon ended up impressed at how quickly and easily I was able to settle in and start enjoying the game. Tossing the player directly into the action usually isn’t my favorite way to see a game start off, but there’s something about TimeSplitters that just made it jive with me in that “special” sort of way. As stated, the gameplay is pretty much a general “run around shooting a lot of stuff” affair, but the game puts in a number of novelties to prevent the experience from becoming mundane. Each time period in the game has a distinctly different theme to it, with its own variety of monsters, weapons, and even NPC companions. Cortez’s first jump through time takes him back to an island off the coast of Scotland in 1924, with old-style rifles, pistols, and some slightly-fictional SMGs appropriate for the era and a slightly eccentric commando by the name of Captain Ash providing backup to Cortez. The next time period is 1969, which basically becomes something of an Austin Powers / James Bond mishmash with Soviet rifles, diabolical traps, an over-dose of funk, and a super-spy simply called “Harry Tipper” to top it all off. And it goes on from there – other themes include creeping through a zombified house (complete with an underground research facility gone horribly wrong), sneaking into a high-tech futuristic office building, and taking part in an all-out war with humanity fighting for survival against a crazed robotic army. Unfortunately, this campaign really isn’t all that long (determined players should have no trouble beating it in a single sitting), so despite the clever and occasionally hilarious cutscenes, and even the awesome addition of co-op play (hooray!), TimeSplitters’ Story-mode experience is sadly something of a limited one.

Fortunately, the game has far, far more than a simple brief campaign to offer the casual gamer. The “Challenge” mode, for starters, offers a number of really creative twists on a typical gameplay approach that is both amusing and, on occasion, insanely nerve-wracking. I only gave a few of these a workout, but my personal favorite is the turret game where I was challenged to use both controllers and triggers on my Xbox controller to control two separate static turrets against multiple waves of TimeSplitter attacks – at the same time. Other challenges include trying to keep an entire group of dancing monkeys powered up with an Electro-Tool (without overloading them) for the longest possible time, shooting down random aircraft from a stationary turret position, and even shooting hoops using the game’s hackneyed physics manipulator (I’m sorry, “Temporal Uplink”) tool that’s become the latest fad in the industry. Finally, the Arcade mode allows players to set up and run their own offline bot matches Unreal Tournament style, configuring their own settings as they go or trying their hand at the “League” option. The bot play is actually quite entertaining, and while the AI wasn’t astoundingly brilliant or anything, they still carried themselves quite nicely, and the ability to reconfigure just about everything about them is very nice.

And of course, multiplayer is the next big feature the game has to offer, with standard-issue support for split screen, System Link, and Xbox Live play. Sadly, the aforementioned co-op mode is restricted to split-screen only, but the game’s online functionality is surprisingly vast. Some stand-out features include the ability to play the game’s Challenge mode online by uploading replays of your best runs and having your statistics recorded onto the scoreboard for everyone to see, as well as the kick-ass map-exchange system (which compliments the included map editor nicely – more details in a bit). What really struck me though is how tight the gameplay felt online, and how reliable and responsive the game’s network code was. While playing online, the game actually felt as polished and intense as any Unreal Tournament release, and with all the different customization options, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect offers enough gaming goodness to make it last for a very long time. Which makes me even sadder that it came out this close to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, because at the moment it’s rather hard to find some decent matches going online, and the community doesn’t seem quite as large as it really should be. Still, the game’s online potential shows tons of promise, and I hope it expands more in the future.

The control scheme is a critical part to any FPS gaming experience (especially one on a console), and thankfully TimeSplitters: Future Perfect offers an input system that is very easy to pick up and play with. This may be in part due to the game’s curious lack of a jump button (which isn’t a HUGE issue, but still a bit odd), but this is actually the first FPS game I’ve run into that doesn’t make use of every button on the Xbox controller. X reloads your weapon, B does a melee attack, A is the general “Use” button, and the left and right triggers throw grenades and shoot your gun respectively, but aside from a casual crouch and zoom function via the L3 and R3 inputs, that’s about all the game really demands – and thanks to the way the gameplay is structured, this is also about all it really needs. Players can even specifically customize what each and every button on the controller is bound to (FINALLY!) rather than having to rely on an awkward set of pre-assigned configurations, and can also customize their looking speed, auto-aim functionality, crosshair settings, and a number of other features, setting TS:FP far above the competition in terms of user-friendliness and accessibility.

Sadly, despite the many things TimeSplitters does right on the Xbox, it also does a few things wrong. Most significantly is that while the action is fun-filled and intense, it still ends up feeling a little too generic and repetitive at times. The storyline and light-hearted humor contribute heavily toward making the experience an interesting one, but I feel the game still had a lot of potential to do more for the single player-oriented gamers and really doesn’t strive enough to make itself extra-special. Some slightly more believable (behavior-wise, I mean) enemies, friendly NPCs, and scripted events could have made the game more exciting, and the lack of a jump function really limited my options during a level and made the environments feel even more linear. I also feel the campaign could have easily been quite a bit longer, although its length is understandable given the amount of secondary content available.

In the field of artistic style, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect offers quite a spiffy presentation. The level design is a little constrictive, but the loading points are spaced out quite a bit (and those that do occur are very brief) and the areas expansive enough to keep the action going. Curiously, I did run into a stability problem once during a hacking scenario where I skipped a cutscene and my Xbox locked right up, but I have no idea what exactly could have caused it, and it never occurred again, so it may have just been a random bug – however, this meant that I had to do the entire level all over again because the game didn’t save my checkpoint status, and given how much I’ve ranted lately about how much I hate doing things over again, this was obviously a very bad thing. Still, the engine is very feature-complete, with a good amount detail in the level design and some really nice special effects (I particularly liked the sparking effects from damaged computer consoles). The weapon and character animations are also of the expected quality from today’s shooters, although I found that the player models sometimes came off a little weird upon close observation during co-op play (especially crouching while reloading, which produced some incredibly weird effects). As an excellent touch, the game also sports a full physics suite for corpses and assorted worldly objects, which leads to some cool and hilarious gameplay opportunities. The only real downside is that the game’s graphics engine tended to sputter a lot under heavy action, resulting in jumpy firefights as the FPS rating dropped through the floor. This wasn’t terribly common or severe, but definitely noticeable and just goes on to further show that the current Xbox technology can only be pushed so far with the ongoing advances of the industry.

One of the niftiest features TimeSplitters ships with is something of a rarity in today’s console market (especially with FPS titles): a map editor. Initially I was a bit skeptical about the entire concept, but after giving the thing a thorough workout, I’m more than impressed. By using a simple series of pre-fabs (sorry, no direct geometry construction for all you UnrealED/Hammer editing nuts out there) to construct rooms and general geometry, the editor allows players to easily splice together all kinds of interesting levels. The editor also allows for a surprisingly advanced level of gameplay scripting, as players can use the logic editor to set up events and trigger scripted sequences. Maps can be made and set up to run under any number of the game’s custom modes (be it a single player “Story” mission, Capture the Bag, Assault, or even Monkey Assistant), and thanks to the deluge of reconfigurable options available, it seems as if the only limit to what kind of content players can generate is the extent of their imagination. Well, somewhat – the map editor has a few annoying limitations. The most glaring is that players attempting to set up big, expansive levels with objective-based gameplay and wacky vehicular action will instantly find themselves severely restricted by the Xbox’s memory limitations, which has forced the developers to impose a hard limit on not only how large maps can physically be, but how much geometry can be crammed into them as well (an indicator consistently keeps track of how much “free” memory is left), which quickly forced me to scale down my plans for “the best damn map I’ve made in the last three months” to a depressing extent. This, plus the specific focus on prefab-based map constriction means that level designers don’t really have the option of getting too creative with their levels (and certainly can’t make anything near the complexity or scale of the maps seen in the single player campaign), but taking into account what effort the developers had to go to in order to enable this functionality in the first place, I’m quite amazed at how well its implemented overall. Thanks to the ability for mapmakers to actually put their maps onto Xbox Live for others to use and play on, TimeSplitters offers an amazing new approach to expanding its lifetime as a fun and interesting game.

To be totally honest, I was really amazed at how well this game turned out. Apparently having jaded expectations in today’s industry pays off, because my initial theory that this game would be a mediocre release instead turned into joy and rapture when I found a cool game rife with tons of content and a fun storyline that has really helped give me a fond impression of the series – but what really blew me away was the inclusion of a cool and intuitive (if limited) map editor and the online facilities for players to trade their works of art amongst one-another easily and efficiently. If this game’s online community is given the chance to grow and prosper, then TimeSplitters: Future Perfect really has a chance to become a great title, and I hope enough people out there take note of this article and pick this game up to help make it happen. Is this game worth buying for the casual FPS gamer? Absolutely. Time to split!