If you've never played this game before I would describe it as a mix of Singularity and Resistance: Fall of Man. It's got the time travel/time power abilities of Singularity with the alternate World War aspect of Resistance and it's weapons with secondary fires. It also has some Wolfenstein like aesthetics. Some of the guns are fun but ones like the EMF and Thunderbolt are so OP they make the rest of the weapons moot.

Like Fracture, the game I played before this, it's pretty one note that gets old quick. You simply slow time, shoot bad guys, move through linear level. The use of reversing time and completly stopping time are hardly ever used. Slowing time is the best option so you do it over and over again. There are only a few very remedial puzzles to solve and it could have done a lot more with this concept. I was thinking of Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time as an example of a much better shooter game with puzzles that required you to use your time stopping powers. This game needed more of things like that. It also has next to no story what so ever and has the tropes this era brought along of no sprinting and a voiceless playable character. Also there are no collectibles, secrets, or map pickups other than weapons. I think a nice element that could have been added to spruce it up some would have been a pickup that allows you to reverse time before your death to help avoid going through a tedious load screen again and starting back over at the checkpoint. There could have been one or two of these sprinkled throughout every level. Would have given you reason to explore the map and incorporated it's time element a bit more. You actually die surprisingly easily even on the easiest difficulty which becomes frustrating and annoying. The most annoying aspect of this game was the jumping mechanic which i think is the single worst jumping mechanic in any FPS ever.

Overall Timeshift is fine. Singularity uses its time elements much better in it's story, setting, and atmosphere yet Timeshift holds up okay 13 years later. I would have found it much better around the time of release, especially if I was able to play it's multiplayer, but it's certainly been done much better since.

Reviewed on Mar 25, 2021


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