Should You Play... TimeShift | Zircon in the Rough
6Let’s talk about TimeShift.
TimeShift is a game that is considered a hidden gem by many people. It didn’t receive much publicity because it came out in 2007, during a golden age of shooters, with games such as Halo 3, Bioshock, the Orange Box, and Crysis coming out that same year, but I do remember people talking about it and it getting a considerable amount of shelf space and publicity in my local GameStop over a decade ago, so there must’ve been something to this game, right?
Wrong. Well ok, maybe not wrong. Saying “wrong” would be like tearing off a dumb nerd’s right while attempting to administer a robust twist. To a 2007 audience with a limited game library, this could be considered a hidden gem, as I do know of several people who really enjoy this game, but through modern eyes the game just feels like a derivative of the worst sort.
For starters, it lacks originality. However, let me clear one thing up, amigo. I’m not one of those people who thinks a game needs to innovate on some front in order to be considered a good or even excellent game. No sir-ee. A lot of my favorite games are admittedly not original in the slightest. My issue with TimeShift’s lack of originality, however, is that it doesn’t necessarily implement the mechanics it lifted from other games in a meaningful or interesting way. In fact, a lot of the mechanics just feel like cheap dollar-store imitations of what made those other games great.
The main mechanic in particular is the worst offender. You have three abilities: slowing time, reversing time, and stopping time. And I’ll only make the obvious joke about stopping time once. While all three of these abilities come into play, the only one that’s useful in combat is slowing time, because the other abilities drain too quickly, and stopping time in particular slows your character down way too much to be convenient for the player.
There are some pretty great guns in here though, and firing them is fairly satisfying. I just wish you weren’t limited to two guns and a sidearm. The only consolation I get from this, however, is the fact that the guns are pretty fun to use. The shotgun is a real epic gamer moment because you can do this, and the crossbow is ridiculously powerful at close range, medium range, and long range. Or, to put it in layman’s terms, all the ranges. It one-shots enemies with staggering accuracy and turns them into the forbidden sloppy joe. It also has a huge clip size and there’s tons of ammo for it lying around.You can easily power through the entire game with just the shotgun and crossbow.
The game that most people compare this, uh, experience to is Half-Life 2. I do understand this comparison, but I think the comparisons begin and end with both this game’s narrative structure and the presence of puzzles that exist to break up the monotony of shooting bullet sponges in slightly varying shiny grey T shirts over and over.
The narrative in Half-Life 2 is structured in a way that makes the player feel like they are going on an adventure and not just going from one grey shooting arena to the next. TimeShift kind of captures this same feeling, but does several things wrong. For starters, the loading between areas isn’t seamless. In Half-Life 2, the levels blend together with a short loading screen that doesn’t interrupt the action too much and gives the world this more open feel. It feels like Gordon is naturally progressing from one place to the next without skipping a beat. TimeShift, on the other hand, has too many scenarios where you teleport from one place to another or get TimeShifted (see what I did there?) to some random area that will leave the player feeling confused and restricted. Sometimes the camera will also pan to third person, which is something Half-Life never did because it breaks immersion. It’s not like these third-person scenes were really necessary to progress the plot either, since this game barely had any plot that extended beyond “go kill this guy Dr. Krone"
As for the puzzles, they’re pretty bad. They pretty much just amount to “press F at the right time to keep moving.” They’re not complex or intriguing, and they don’t feel satisfying to complete like the puzzles in Half-Life 2 do. The time suit just isn’t used to its fullest potential like the gravity gun was.
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At present, CreamyClaws has 82 views spread across 1 video for TimeShift, with his channel publishing less than an hour of TimeShift content. This makes up 1.29% of the content that CreamyClaws has uploaded to YouTube.