Doing the Time Warp

Among the latest slew of games I've picked up lately, was a game called Timeshift.

It's a FPS about a "highly respected physicist with a dark past" who steals a suit that allows you to control time. Basically it's Blinx with machine guns, rocket launchers and new age Nazis.

It's a beautiful game, the landscape is yet another post-apocalyptic wasteland (something that's very popular these days), but one that's nice to look at. At least until you get to levels where the main bad guy is spouting propaganda on ALL of the screens and radios in town. That gets a bit old, plus it's something we've already seen in Half Life 2, almost verbatim. In any case the visuals are amazing, especially when time stops in the rain - WOW.

The time control elements play nicely with a shooter game, but unfortunately it's not exactly a new gimmick. Tons of shooters have "Bullet-time" or "Slomo" sequences that allow you to kill 20 baddies before they can get a single shot off. Of course Timeshift does add the other two time features, stop and rewind.

These two powers are by far the most fun you can have with the game. I love to stop time, run up and steal Sergeant Red Shirt's gun. When I start time again, I like to wave as he looks confused about where it went, then shoot him repeatedly. I call it the Van Damme Maneuver, though if Timecop was more like this game, I would have loved it (rather than tolerating the first 10 minutes or so to see Mia Sara naked then changing the channel).

Anyway, the rewind function is fun too, but more restrictive in its usefulness. There are parts when rewinding time is the only way to get through an area. I would have liked it more if you could use rewind right as you die to get a second chance, but that's apparently too hard to program.

The AI is pretty impressive. The baddies will flank you, ambush you, or simply hide until you get tired of waiting, then blow you to smoking bits. However, for some reason the ones you pull the Van Damme Maneuver on, simply stand there looking around, and when you shoot them they simply crouch down. Seems to me I'd run away, fast. The "duck and cover" thing really doesn't work for anything - except nuclear attacks and volcanoes of course.

Bottom line? I like it, it's a great break from the buggy, lagg-tastic, sado-masochistic experience that is Hellgate: London. I almost wish the Techno-Gremlin Gods would come at night and delete all my Hellgate files and scratch the ever-loving crap out of the disc....almost....