Genre: Action
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Developer: Saber Interactive
Release Date: October 30, 2007

I desperately wanted TimeShift to be a better game than it is.

The version that went to retail is indescribably better than the preview version shopped around to journalists by Atari a little over a year ago. It looks better, the dopey storyline is far less … well, dopey, and the multiplayer has a lot more to offer. What was really amazing was seeing the passion and drive the Saber Interactive developers put into improving the game. They knew the Randy Quaid performance sucked, and their story sucked more. They desperately wanted their game not to suck, and what they achieved in a year is remarkable.

Of course, one year isn't a lot of time for completely overhauling a game, and there are places where it shows. Much of the story is unchanged. A lot of the original, flawed level designs are still the same. TimeShift acquits itself poorly against other heavy-hitting Q4 FPSes like The Orange Box and Halo 3, and honestly doesn't even manage to compare to Gears of War. Maybe an extra six months of polish and a Q1 release would've left us with a better game, but there comes a time when you've just got to release the damn game and move on. TimeShift is good enough that I'm really interested in seeing what Saber Interactive does next, on a less tortured production schedule, but it's hard to recommend by itself. If you do pick it up and hang onto it, it'll be for the multiplayer.

TimeShift's single-player is best summed up with the words "linear" and "disappointing." The game somehow feels both too short and too tedious. Enemies aren't difficult to outsmart, but they have tons of HP and appear in massive packs that require you to use your time powers to manage. This makes battles feel vaguely like you're playing with cheat codes on. This is going to appeal to some gamers but can also make the proceedings feel a little dull and repetitive (if you, like me, don't much enjoy playing games with cheat codes on). The only exceptions to this are when you run into "instant death" traps that are basically puzzles you have to work out by using your time powers to get around the thing that kills you. Expect to die a lot of frustrating deaths before you figure out exactly what ridiculous thing the game wants you to do. The variety of weapons isn't very wide, mostly the various Half-Life standbys or obvious variations of them. Your attack plans are usually built around the AI's flagrant refusal to open closed doors or coordinate their attacks against you.

Even though the entire game is supposedly built around the time-travel powers of your hero's amazing beta suit, you have to play through an entire level before you even get to use those powers, and you spend half of that time with no weapons, just sort of looking at the background graphics. This isn't the best introduction to the game, since without the time manipulation, TimeShift gets really boring. When your time powers are available to you, there are no tutorials for using them (something that, even if clumsily, the Atari version of the title provided). It's not a great decision, since the game immediately introduces sequences where you use the right power at the right time or you die.

There are also plenty of annoying "choke points" that seem to dare a gamer not to throw down the controller in frustration, as the game seems to ask them to do something impossible or irritating. There are numerous jumping puzzles that demand use of the time powers, which means if you fail once, you have to wait for your gauge to fill back up before trying again. Sequences clearly designed for sniping are nearly unplayable in the 360 version, since at 720p resolution, you frequently can't make out your targets even when you're zoomed in and using long-range weapons. It's always better to trust in your time powers (and your ability to steal everybody's weapons while time is stopped), and just bull through challenges with brute force.

The controls for using your powers are also a little awkward — LB + X, Y, or B to trigger the appropriate power. Since there's no way to differentiate the 360 controller buttons by touch, you frequently end up using the wrong power if you try to quickly activate something in a firefight. This is only really disastrous if you end up activating Stop or Reverse when you wanted to use Slow. The Reverse and Stop powers are only occasionally useful outside of the puzzles designed to be solved by them. Reverse can save you from grenades, and Stop is useful for dealing with turrets and tanks. Slow is your usual standby, though, since it's the power effect that lasts the longest. Using it in a battle lets you effortlessly control the situation, so you end up over-relying on it during the course of your game. You end up feeling like you're playing a sort of poor man's F.E.A.R. as a result, since the enemies in TimeShift post little threat aside from their ungodly ability to soak dozens of rounds of carbine fire unless you remember to shoot them in their unarmored crotches. In TimeShift, the crotch is an even deadlier hit location than the head, since most soldiers wear helmets. This sums up my reservations with the game.

Now, if the game wants you to spend so much time looking at your surroundings, do they actually look good? Fortunately, yes. There are some especially nice rain effects that freeze or move backwards appropriately when you reverse time. Explosions are, likewise, lovely in reverse. Large moving background objects, like fighter jets or giant robots, look as good and menacing as they should. Everything manages to be distinct despite a predictable fixation on the colors brown and grey, with the color palette only failing you during sniping sequences. The cityscapes strike a good balance between "realistic" and "imaginative," and everything has a pleasantly convincing quality of rot and decay about it.

It is a little disappointing that a time-travel game sticks so closely to basically the same aesthetic Gears of War got out of an alien invasion, but it's at least well-done and convincing. There are problems, though, with some basic graphics glitches related to movement that just shouldn't be in a retail game. There's one level where you can encounter a floating gun in an area where enemies are (apparently) supposed to spawn. The rag doll physics are poorly implemented — enemies launch themselves over any nearby railing regardless of how you kill them, and an enemy killed in a doorway has truly horrific seizures while the game tries to figure out how to position his body relative to the door, which is probably going to shut and clip through him.

Now, the graphics have a certain … shall we say, Russian flair to them. If you ported S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl to the 360, I think you'd end up with something that looked less polished than this. Much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., backgrounds look very impressive until you inspect any single object up-close, at which point the textures begin to seem kind of weird and unnatural. Of course, this is an FPS, so you're not really supposed to be that close to anything anyway, unless you're looking for a door to open, or a switch or lever you need to hit. The only way to find these points of interaction is to force the camera really unnaturally close to the area. This does a lot to destroy the feeling that you're seeing the world through a person's eyes, and not just playing as a floating camera with a gun sticking out the bottom.

Multiplayer levels are built with a very different, better sense of logic to them than the single-player levels. It's actually amazing how much better the multi is than the single-player, suggesting that multi got the lion's share of the effort when the game was "recreated" for Sierra. Of course, some of the multi maps appear to be the original Atari maps, so maybe this part of the game was just stronger to begin with. Regardless, there are six multiplayer games, the self-explanatory Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Meltdown Madness, King of Time, Capture the Flag and One-on-One. Your time-manipulation powers work very differently in TimeShift multiplayer, with the entire experience built around "time grenades." Basically, you use time grenades to manipulate time with the Slow, Stop and Reverse effects, but in a limited spatial area. This makes Slow a little less all-powerful and Stop a little bit more viable, but most of the problems with the time powers in the single-player mode apply to multiplayer, too. Mostly, players seem to focus on using Slow to get speed boosts.

As of this writing, the online competition for TimeShift has thinned out dramatically, so anyone who purchases a copy of the game now may have difficulty setting up matches if you can't get the game thoroughly populated across your friends list. Getting matches to test out the various game types was difficult, and it was rare to get a full 16 players together for anything. Even getting eight players was difficult. TimeShift also uses a strange mode where you wander around a map while waiting on a match instead of waiting in a match lobby, and this has certain problems. A match host who has to wait awhile on more players can spend it wandering around the map to snatch up the best weapons and memorize all of the best sniping locations (just as an example). A standard lobby system would've been a lot more workable.

So, playing Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch doesn't feel incredibly different in TimeShift from playing it in any other FPS. So do Capture the Flag and One-on-One (which seems to be the least popular game mode). You can spice this up by applying presets, extra rules that affect the physics and weapon selection available in the fight. There are at least eight presets for every game, and then some presets that are only available for certain types of matches (like Last Man Standing for Deathmatch). This significantly improves the multiplayer quality. The presets don't really do anything wildly unprecedented as FPS multi rules go, but it's rare to see this level of customizability on a console. The only real downside to it is realizing that presets tend to affect the outcome of multi matches far more so than time grenades.

The two multi modes built around the time powers are pretty brilliant. In Meltdown Madness, both teams have a reactor counting down to zero, and your goal is to slow down the other team's reactor so yours goes off first. King of Time lets a single player be totally immune to other players' time effects, so long as he has possession of the King of Time sphere that starts the game at the middle of the map. Other gamers need to somehow kill the King of Time so they can take his crown, gaining immunity to time grenades … and getting every other player on the map after them. It's a shame that these games don't have more participation with the multiplayer community, because if you can miraculously get eight people together for either, they're an absolute treat and unlike anything you can do in any other FPS. Adding on presets just makes them more entertaining.

Ultimately, TimeShift is a game that leaves you with a lousy single-player experience that staggers between "too easy" and "you want me to do what?", and multiplayer that's pretty amusing but not quite good enough to carry such an otherwise glitchy, problematic game. It's a great thing to improve your game's look and story as much as you can before shipping, but you need to make sure the levels are still interesting and fully playable as intended. I mean, Halo 3 levels are basically just long tunnels, but they're long tunnels where your goals are always clear and you're eager to see what's around the next bend.

TimeShift frequently faced me with challenges that were initially incomprehensible, and then too easy to overcome once I had some idea of what the hell I was supposed to do. A lot of this lousy level design is clearly leftover from the Atari build, and really should've been improved with the rest of the game. If Saber had found time to do that and work the more interesting time powers, Stop and Reverse, organically into the single-player gameplay, then TimeShift would've been a real winner. Instead, it's eye-catching but lacking in substance and the multiplayer fans that it would need to really shine on Xbox Live.

Score: 6.9/10