TimeSplitters retrospective

Recently I replayed TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on my old Xbox original, or I tried to at least, my disc is so scratched and damaged that the game crashed half-way through 3 or 4 of the levels until I finally gave up after about 9 levels. But anyway, despite the set-backs I can safely say that the game is still one of my favourite games of all time; in fact I played so much back in the day, that it’s entered that small cohort of games that if I sat myself in a dark, quite room with my eyes closed I could probably just think the entire game in my head. I don’t replay games as much as I used to, but seeing as I’ve have replayed this one again, I thought I’d a do short review of all three of games in the TimeSplitters series.

The series was created by Free Radical, which was founded by former employees of Rare, specifically employees who had worked on the N64 classic GoldenEye. While the rest of Rare went on to release Perfect Dark, Free Radical went on to create TimeSplitters, and it as this point in the history that I’m going to break things up a little. I played the TimeSplitters series in reverse order of release and so I’ve decided that that is the order in which I’m going to review them.

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect was purchased by my brother about 15 years ago, along with a small set of other games for the Xbox original which also consisted of Halo: Combat Evolved, Fable: The Lost Chapters, and SplinterCell. Anyway, my brother played through TimeSplitters once, did a few of the challenges and arcade league matches, and then never played the game again. I, on the other hand, started playing the game and then never stopped. It very swiftly became one of my favourite games, although that’s not a challenging thing; I was that type of person who just played the same five or six games over and over again, somehow without getting sick of them. Certainly couldn’t do that now; or maybe I could, I’m not sure. The only thing is there are so many other games that I want to sink my teeth into now, that I might go nuts if I just play TimeSplitters, Fable, Half-Life, and Oddworld over and over again.

Anyway, the game starts off with Space Marine Sergeant Cortez flying a spaceship back to a scarred and war-torn Earth with a mysterious package. An opening monologue from who I assume is the radio support character from the game explains that the year is 2401 and an ongoing war is raging between the Humans and the evil TimeSplitters, and Humanity is losing to the point of extinction through the TimeSplitters use of time travel unravelling Earths history. The package in the possession of Cortez contains 9 stolen time crystals that are to be used to power Humanities own time machine and hopefully destroy the source of time crystals themselves before they can ever be harvested for use by the TimeSplitters and erasing the war from history.

Okay, the story is dumb, but it’s the type of dumb that was common in this era of video games with titles such as the aforementioned Fable, or Resident Evil 4. A type of tongue-in-cheek camp that made games stand-out as basically a source of silly entertainment. The context was kind of daft but in a self-knowing way and a satisfying gameplay loop that created a great sense of catharsis. Just look at Spider-Man 2 for the PS2 (that is actually its full title), a dumb story about a superhero and silly villains but with one of the most satisfying core gameplay loops of its time and almost unmatched in its gratifying gameplay to this day.

Anyway, Cortex makes it to the Human base to power-up the time machine, and thus begins a time-hopping quest to save the world across the whole of human history, or about five hundred years of it, the earliest being barely 80 years ago at the time of release. In fact, that’s one of the biggest complaints I have for this series, it rarely takes the chance to really dig deep into human history, the earliest they go to being the Wild West in the second game. However, an argument could be made for the fact that it IS a first person shooter franchise, and even the Wild West is pushing it for decent but historically accurate shooting as a game mechanic, but I would argue that a good first-person action game doesn’t necessarily need to have guns. Think of the chainsaw in Doom; or the crowbar in Half-Life; in fact more or less all 90’s FPS games had a signature melee weapon. Sure, they weren’t very good but you could always just design them to be so if you have a level with no projectile weaponry. And speaking of, there are pre-gun projectile weaponry that any first-person game could use; namely longbows, crossbow, and spears; the Doom engine RPG Strife used a wooden crossbow as a starting weapon, and there was that stake launcher from Painkiller that fired entire tree trunks.

With all that being said though, the different time periods the game is set in is actually one of its biggest strengths and that’s because I gives rise to a vast degree of variety. Variety in firstly each level (or pair of levels) which take place in a different time period which not only gives rise to a variety of environments but also weaponry and enemy type. For example the first time hop takes us to a pseudo-World-War-2, Medal of Honor style of level taking place on an island and featuring very basic kinds of weaponry of the period; it’s a fairly simple start but soon gets far more interesting, not to say that this level is boring in any way. The next level is basically Bond- themed, with suave secret agents stealthy infiltration style of gameplay (if you want to) and an evil genius trying to take over the world. Next up we have a bit of a tonal shift to a survival horror level featuring a country mansion full of zombies with a secret laboratory in the basement a la Resident Evil, where your main source of defence is a simple double-barrelled shotgun. After that we go into the more futuristic setting with a level which I was heavily reminded of playing Perfect Dark for the first time where you infiltrate a high-rise office building with advanced futuristic security, and find another secret laboratory in the basement which turns a bit Aliens with genetic mutants instead of actual mutants. And finally we get to the robot wars which is almost a copy paste of the future scenes from the Terminator films.

This is just the variety of genre, or theme. Each one also comes with its own variety of weapons and enemies. As for weapons you always have a starting pistol and subsequent machine gun, along with your unarmed gravity-gun-from-Half-Life tool, leaving three weapon slots for a bit more creativity; including rocket launchers, miniguns, sniper rifles, a baseball bat for the zombie level, a flamethrower, a harpoon gun, an electro-tool, and an EMP gun which I really want in real life. Enemy variety comes in a number of ways too; every level except the zombie level has human enemies that all act the same but along with them you can have several different type of robot; most of which are really dangerous and hard to kill; the aforementioned zombies, ghosts, mutants, and of course the titular TimeSplitters.

There’s also variety in the boss fights. Now, when I play a game with any kind of combat, I expect boss fights. I LOVE boss fights and TimeSplitters boss fights are... actually fairly basic in terms of actually fighting: put enough damage in to kill them is more or less the basis for all of them, although a fair number do come with a one-time weak spot for massive damage or specific vulnerable spots that are the only place where you can damage them.

After a couple of years of playing TimeSplitters 3, I decided that I would splash out and get myself a copy of TimeSplitters 2. I heard that the story mode of the second one was a lot more disjointed than the third one, and first one even more so, put I threw my hands up and got it anyway. TimeSplitters 2 takes place immediately before TimeSplitters 3 and sees the mission by Sergeant Cortez and his partner Corporal Hart (she dies) to steal the time crystals we see Cortez in possession of at the start of the next game. The opening cutscene explains the background of the series in much the same way as TimeSplitters 3 does, and then sees the two protagonists infiltrating, very loudly with bullets, a TimeSplitter spaceship to steal the crystals. But they get to the time machine room too late, the TimeSplitters are already moving the 9 time crystals to 9 different periods of history and it’s now up to Cortez to travel through time to get them back. That’s more or less it for the story; apart from one brief cutscene after level 7 (I think), we don’t see anything of the main story until level 10 once all 9 crystals have been recovered. Every time Cortez travels to the past he “time splits” Quantum Leap style into the body of a soldier, or insurgent, or detective of the time who has their own mission to complete. For example, the second level features a prohibition-era detective trying to take down a mobster in Chicago; and so the objectives of the level involves meeting contacts and getting into the mobsters hideout; retrieving the time crystal is always fundamental to the plot of the level though and rarely, if ever, feels like a detour. The different time periods offers up a greater amount of variety than its immediate sequel, though not by a huge amount, some of my favourites include the Wild West level, the gangster level, the Siberian dam level, and the Blade Runner-esque NeoTokyo level.

After several years of playing TimeSplitters 2 and 3, I finally got around to getting myself a copy of TimeSplitters 1, and it was... kind of disappointing in comparison. When I first got it I was operating on the knowledge that completing the game of all three difficulties was part of the completionist way of playing so I decided to forgo my usual difficulty choice of medium and start the story mode on easy. I had the finished the story mode on easy in 20 minutes flat. Medium and hard did give me at least an hour each, but the story mode of this game is incredibly short on any difficulty; also the term “story” is completely misused in this circumstance. There are nine levels in the “story” mode, each one has one objective: get the MacGuffin  and then get to the exit. That’s it. That’s all the context you’re getting for this story mode. The only other context you can get for this game is on the back cover of the box where it describes the evil TimeSplitters roused from an ancient sleep to destroy humanity or something along those lines. This is the basis of the TimeSplitter war fought in the other games, the way that the TimeSplitters travel throughout human history in order to destroy us, but with an hour’s play time, there’s no cutscenes, no context, not even an ending, just the ending of each individual level which is basically just the words “Level Complete” followed by a completion time.

I can forgive TimeSplitters 1 under one circumstance though: the story mode is simply a backdrop for the extra content, the challenge mode and the multiplayer, and this topic brings to why I think the TimeSplitters series is one of the best series of all time. There is so much content on the disc. Let’s take a look at the third one seeing as that’s the one I’m most familiar with. Once you sign into your in-game profile you’re greeted to the main menu. At the top is the story mode. This would last a new player about 5 to 7 hours depending on difficulty, a short story mode but brimming with creativity and effort and great fun while it lasts. Below story is Arcade Mode which, when selected gives you the choices of Arcade League or Arcade Custom. Arcade Custom is your multiplayer: about 20 game modes, roughly the same number of maps, weapon preferences and bot preferences with dozens of weapons to choose from and over a hundred characters to choose from for your bots and for yourself. Arcade League on the other hand gives you 27 pre-determined arcade matches with awards to be won depending on your score. Back to the main menu you next have Challenges, which offer you a whole range of weird challenges for you to complete, including killing waves of zombies, curling with monkeys, a weird basketball game, racing a robot cat around a track, and smashing windows with bricks.

Most of the characters that I mentioned earlier you can unlock by getting certain awards in the Challenges and Arcade league, or by completing the story levels of different difficulties. And with all this in mind, here is my point: would a game be released today packed with this much content, that is just on the game? Not dissected on an operating table so they could sell the giblets back to you as DLC, usually in such ludicrous degrees that one could easily end paying way over twice as much as the original cost of the fucking game? Even without taking into account the fucking microtransactions that would riddle a game of this shear calibre. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, as well as its predecessors, represents to me what gaming used to be before companies started taking advantage of the internet to start selling disgusting amounts of DLC, usually no more that a single player skin, or weapon, or map.

It’s not my favourite FPS of all time; that accolade would probably go to Half-Life, but with Half-Life, you play through once over the course of about 10 hours, and that’s it, you’ve finished the game, on to something else. TimeSplitters, on the other hand, you can sink days into. Sure the story mode takes only a few hours, but the extra content that just comes free on the actual disc is huge. I’ve been playing on the same save for nearly fifteen years, and there are still two character models that I still haven’t unlocked. If the game had been released today, I could probably just cough-up ten quid and have done with it without any effort put into it at all (not that I would purchase DLC of that shallow nature). It will take actual effort to finally unlock those two character models. The only problem is the challenges I need to get gold medals in are fucking impossible.