TimeShift

TimeShift is an entertaining shooter with a different take on the tried and true bullet-time mechanic, but feels like there were a lot of golden opportunities lost. Still, you won’t regret your time spent in TimeShift.

A great deal of work was done to bring the look and feel of TimeShift up to date, though an equal amount of time should have been spent on the design and presentation.

While not as brilliant or as stunningly beautiful as other first-person shooters already available, TimeShift is still a fun shooter that plays up the action rather well. Despite a disorienting story that will leave gamers confused by the plot, it’s the action and time-manipulating gimmick that will hook gamers in long enough to see it through to the end.

There's enough action here to distract, but compared to its peers TimeShift feels outdated. [Jan 2008, p.74]

Fun in short controlled bursts, but far too straighforward and repetitive to stand up to long, involved periods of play. [Issue#162, p.90]

It doesn’t make TimeShift a bad game, it edges slightly above average thanks to the time powers.

We might say that this game was a bit “unlucky” with its release date, because it can’t measure up with some of the FPS that came out this year. The truth is, although the time controls are a fun idea, everything else is a carbon copy of every other generic shooter out there. [Dec 2007]

While TimeShift is perfectly adequate for killing a few hours, as a rental perhaps, it never elevates itself from merely okay, and if you only buy one shooter for the holidays you can do much better than this.

Its time-altering mechanics add a lot to what is otherwise fairly standard gameplay with standard weapons in a game world that's not particularly distinctive, and the end result is a game that's good but never quite rises to greatness, yet in some places comes tantalisingly close.

Timeshift starts off with a bang, with impressive visuals and God-like powers at your fingertips. The bang, however, fails to last throughout the game, and you’ll constantly find it harder and harder to keep going.

A decent shooter with a gimmick that sets it apart. Without the time shifting abilities, TimeShift would have been a less than mediocre shooter, especially considering some of the amazing FPS games that it has to compete with. The time manipulation gimmick makes TimeShift an enjoyable if forgettable experience.

An interesting time-shifting mechanic and fun-to-shoot weapons can't make up for the rest of TimeShift's run-of-the-mill first-person shooter gameplay.

A feast of missed opportunities. [Jan 2008, p.98]

A workmanlike shooter with a cute gimmick that isn't close to being enough. [Jan 2008, p.119]