We’ve invented a new minigame within TimeShift, one that its designers didn’t intend when they were putting the game together. We’re pretty sure that means we can call it ‘emergent gameplay’. Anyway, it’s called ‘Spot The Leg’, it’s probably the most fun you can have in TimeShift, and we fully expect it to be officially incorporated into ‘TimeShift 2’. Here’s how it works…

Get a bunch of buddies gathered together around the television. One of you plays TimeShift – everyone else plays ‘Spot The Leg’. Whoever’s playing TimeShift has to slow time then kill an enemy using an explosive weapon. The first player to correctly identify which piece of the ensuing debris is a leg gets a point. Repeat this process until the TimeShift player dies, then tot up the points and declare the player with the highest score the winner. It works even better if you pre-record the footage (no pun intended) in secret and play back each explosion frame-by-frame, but we appreciate you might not have the facilities to do it that way.

So yeah, the best thing about TimeShift is its explosions and subsequent plumes of debris, especially when the explosion is centred on someone’s face and the debris is made up of bits of their body. And the best thing about TimeShift’s time manipulation powers is that they allow you to watch these explosions in glorious slow motion. It’s just unfortunate then that their impact on the actual gameplay is much less significant.

As you might already know, TimeShift’s twist on the usual FPS formula is that you can slow down, pause and rewind time to give yourself an edge over your enemies. In combat, slow and pause are obviously good for making your enemies much easier to hit and for making it much harder for them to hit you, and rewind is handy for returning grenades to sender. Apart from that, there are ‘puzzles’, but given that the time power you need for each situation is chosen for you, they never require very much puzzling on your part and they get very samey, very quickly, anyway. For example, there are a lot of puzzles where you have to hit a button to activate a door or platform or elevator then slow time so that you can get through it or on it or whatever. It breaks things up a little bit we suppose, but Portal this ain’t.

The combat doesn’t involve much ingenuity either. Every encounter tends to play out in pretty much the same way: slow time, attack, hide while time power recharges, slow time again, attack again, hide again, and so on. That’s not to say it isn’t fun – spectacular, mindless violence is always fun, as far as we know – just that it’s very much the same flavour of fun over and over again. It doesn’t help that your time power recharges very quickly, and that the weapons generally feel very overpowered – many allow for easy one-hit kills, and you’ll find crates with infinite supplies of all ammo types at regular intervals throughout the game. It’s not exactly piss-easy, as it will kick your ass if you do something stupid, but it does reward caution and common sense more than skill and reflexes – you get killed for being careless not for being crap – which is what can make it start to get boring once your initial delight at its upbeat, lighthearted approach to extreme violence has started to wear thin.

TimeShift was originally intended to appear on the Xbox 360, but has been through a change of platform, change of publisher and complete overhaul of its look and story. All of this upheaval may have made it better than it would otherwise have been, but it’s also made it later and more disjointed than it would have been. Despite the flashes of quality eye candy it throws up from time to time, it still feels dated. And it still feels like Saber wasn’t entirely sure what it was doing with the property. This would explain both the halfarsed implementation of the time powers and the totally unintelligible story, anyway.

All of the most fun things to do in TimeShift involve creative input on your part. ‘Spot The Leg’ is just one example. We also challenged each other to launch enemies as high into the air as possible by freezing time while they’re in midair then crouching underneath them and shooting them upwards with a shotgun. It’s possible to get them several stories into the air. Stuff like this goes to show that there’s a lot of potential at TimeShift’s core and that so much more could have been done with it. If we’d have felt in any way encouraged to experiment more freely with our time powers, and been rewarded for doing so, then we reckon we would have had a great time with TimeShift from start to finish. As it is, it’s fun for a while, but only before it descends into mind-numbing repetition.

Gavin Mackenzie