Ah, first generation console games. Developers bitching about the new platform... only a few games on the racks... no licensed characters... it's always interesting to watch a new system launch. (And more interesting to imagine what the games will look like a year from now.)
TimeSplitters is a very eager first gen game. It's a striking first person shooter... and I am not a big fan of fps on consoles. Even if you ignore the fabulous graphics (and you won't), it has plenty of extra gaming details that make it well worth buying. This game set out to be one of the first must-have PS2 games, and the general opinion is that it succeeded.
TimeSplitters is a game clearly tailored for showing off the PlayStation 2. The levels and characters are worthy of the best the pc currently has to offer. The textures and maps are detailed and clean... not as clean as the mountains of Smuggler's Run, but crisp enough that you'll be surprised how swift the game moves. PS2 hardware at work! Really, speed is the controlling issue... the first "story" level, Tomb, tries to impress you with both graphics and speed, but the latter quickly outpaces the former. It's particularly impressive in the harder levels where you're attacked by 10+ enemies at once.
The enemies are a pleasure to fight against, mainly because they can behave in clever, realistic battles. They'll duck behind pillars and roll on the ground to avoid your bullets. Amusingly, if you pin down a cowardly enemy, he'll hold his gun over his head and shoot randomly. In the customizable arcade matches, you can tailor the bots individually, choosing both skill and appearance. And there is a wealth of enemy animations for dying! Speaking of dying, you'll do quite a bit of it. It does not take many shots (from a decent level weapon) to put you down, so stealth (and cowardice) may be the better part of valor.
There are many different level themes, covering a century of weapons and scenery. Thankfully, some of the fps cliches have been checked at the door, like the green-pulsing-alien-goo-on-walls-outer-spacestation level. The winning conditions of the "story" levels are largely the same: go find some object and bring it back to where you started.
Completing "story" levels will unlock several arcade levels and challenge levels. The arcade section lets you play capture-the-flag type games (and others), and the challenge rounds offer some difficult purpose and give you about 15 seconds to pull it off.
I've been putting "story" in quotes, you might note. That's because there is no "story" to this game. In fact, the only mention of any kind of plot connecting the various levels is on the back of the box. And what a story that is! Seems that the TimeSplitters are an evil alien race bent on screwing up Earth history and a diverse group of heroes from each time period have to stop them. This is not covered in the manual. I guess I'm spoiled, as every console game these days seems to go to great lengths to incorporate some horrible, pathetic plotline. I was also expecting a cool-ass fmv intro movie too, but TimeSplitters has none.
But TimeSplitters does have an amazing statistics systems (I've shattered 378 panes of glass! I've shot 45,839 bullets! I've punched off 27 heads!) and a great little level editor.
I've been waiting for an easy to use level editor for years, and I would not have guessed that it would come on a console game. Now, TimeSplitters's editor certainly has limitations, but that's the cost you pay for something that doesn't require a degree in Computer Science. Basically, you have several pre-built rooms and room shape elements that you can string together across a nice-sized grid and up several floors. Each room can be assigned a different type of customizable light, and you can drop in the various weapons, power-ups, starting blocks, home bases, etc. You do not get to choose wall textures, however; there are several decoration schemes to choose from. I made a competitive capture-the-flag map that only took 800k on my memory card... so you have a good amount of space to work with. TimeSplitters would be a great game without the editor. Including it makes it a terrific game.
There are many playable characters... your typical tough guys and sexy girls. With the characters - both enemy and friendly - TimeSplitters adopts an interesting, Aeon Flux sort of style. The people are all skinny legs and armor plating. Each character has cutesy animations at the start of each round, but they have no differences in the game itself. They're purely a vanity choice.
So far, I've logged over nine hours on the various play modes of TimeSplitters. I've beaten the first round of easy levels and played many, many capture-the-flag and challenge games. Although I would not call it a hardware showcase title (it's too dark to get non-gamers' jaws to drop, and too similar to a pc game), it is an early attention-getting game.
