The lineage of the Timesplitters games goes back to the heady days of the N64, when a certain development studio by the name of Rare created a certain First Person Shooter called Goldeneye for the spanking new Nintendo console. Teaming the license from one of the better Bond films of recent years with the most proficiently executed FPS ever seen by console owners was a stroke of genius as accidental as it was massive. But Goldeneye on the N64 became a huge phenomenon, and even in these days of HALO 2, there are gamers who maintain they have never enjoyed a console shooter as much, in both single and multiplayer modes. The game’s massive success saw the Bond license snapped up by industry Moby Dick Electronic Arts, and Rare ploughed on with a sequel in spirit, Perfect Dark starring a heroine instead of a hero. But after Goldeneye, many of the original team left to set up a new studio, Free Radical. Free Radical’s first project was Timesplitters, an FPS launch title for the PS2, and an impressive achievement if only for the fact that it provided an accomplished and polished title for a new console whose supply of pre-launch dev kits had been notoriously bad.
The follow-up, Timesplitters 2, was released on Gamecube, Xbox and PlayStation 2, and further developed the characters, artistic style, weapons and settings of the first game. It was published by Eidos. Now more and more console games are offering online play, and it is partly to address this new market that the third in the series, Timesplitters: Future Perfect is being released. Ironically the game is to be published by Electronic Arts, still jealous guardians of the Bond license.
The intriguing idea behind the gameplay is that players must team up with themselves, assist versions of yourself from past and future as you return to different times and place. The game features as wide a range of locations as you’d expect, from a 1914 Scottish castle to the battlefield of a robot war far in the future. All the locations have an attendant and congruous selection of weapons and vehicles that in total number more than 40. PS2 owners can compete online against up to eight opponents. A large selection of game types are on offer including Deathmatch, Vampire and Capture the Bag. Offline, gameplay offers co-op play with a friend through story mode, as well as plenty of Arcade and Challenge mode missions. 150 characters, the usual selection of zombies, robots, commandos and monkeys feature, and the level editor in game is sure to add a lot of longevity to the title… Timesplitters: Future Perfect offers the most features and ideas that the franchise has yet seen.