Time travel. An endless source of science fiction storytelling. A huge well of potential for exotic locales and larger than life characters. An excellent excuse to include monkeys in a first-person shooter.
Hitting the PlayStation 2 for the third time is TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, standing on the shoulders of TimeSplitters 2, or perhaps more appropriately, going back in time and stealing what worked for a solid foundation to build upon.
You know what to expect. Gangly-looking characters, a silly plot, exaggerated acting and amazing multiplayer support. Let's relive the good old days.
Farewell
Before we begin, however, some sad news. After 19 years, my PS2 has come to the end of its life. It still works but does not read discs, and after voiding my warranty to open her up and clean her insides (surprisingly not clogged with dust), I couldn't seem to do anything to remedy the problem.
All hope is not lost - as I say, it still powers on - but not reading discs is kind of a death blow for it. I have forgotten the last game I managed to play on it (it was for this blog, though, so if future me wants to put in the effort to find out and edit this, that'd be great), but I do know the first. Gran Turismo 3. It was the Racing Pack bundle. Can't really forget that giant red box.
We've had some good times. Yes, I really wanted to replace you with a slimline model, but couldn't justify it on account of you still working. Now that plan may return. Time will tell.
Fun Times
Enough of that, though, we've got a spaceship to crash land. It's the far future and Sgt. Cortez is returning from TimeSplitters 2 with a crate full of time crystals. The fate of Earth probably rests on his shoulders, though I must admit to blanking on the events of TimeSplitters 2 right now.
After switching off inverted controls I notice that the aiming for Future Perfect doesn't feel like TimeSplitters. The GoldenEye origins of the floaty, auto-targeting aiming have finally been ripped out, and a more traditional control scheme put in. Instead of running around the first level like Bambi, I feel at home here.
The PlayStation 2 wasn't the natural home of the first-person shooter, so every game had its own take on the control scheme, but it's customisable and I can live with the defaults, even if I don't necessarily agree with them. I did grow up controlling first-person games with analogue sticks, after all.
Obviously, I'm emulating this, and it looks great. The golden glow of future Earth, the bright lights of laser beams and sci-fi weaponry, and the hideous beasties appearing out of thin air trying to kill us.
The mission serves as a little practice for the controls before we kill enough enemies and get the crystals back safely. Which we immediately use to jump back through time to try and clear up all the mess that time travelling crystals create. Of course we do.
This is Future Perfect's story, a tour through time that will see us find and eradicate all traces of the time crystals so that the splitters aren't created and the Earth isn't attacked. Please don't mention any paradoxes; it'll only make my head hurt.
First port of call is an island off the coast of Scotland in 1924.
Through faults of our own making, the island we're investigating is getting utterly destroyed by the Royal Navy. Captain Ash, an overly stereotypical British soldier, is looking to find someone, and we're on a mission to find something to do with time crystals. To be fair, it's all very hectic and I fail to read the various mission objectives or take in the plot through all the communications with Anya back in 2401.
The nature of time travel allows players to experience a variety of weapons. Period-specific rifles are swapped with out-of-place, out-of-time, custom machine guns, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, as you'd expect.
The gunplay is a little chaotic, though that's probably due to my lack of aiming and insistence on squeezing the trigger until the magazine runs out of rounds. The level through this castle has taken us to a trap room where we need to open a portcullis and then protect Captain Ash from a gunboat.
Ah. Well. That's going to make things a little harder. The camera's don't emulate correctly, not with my setup at least. No problem. We'll just have to figure out where to aim the crane from the outside.
Good enough. Let's get on with this level.
The next section introduces a couple of new features to Future Perfect, vehicles and the probably Half-Life- but maybe Second Sight-inspired gravity manipulating temporal uplink. From carrying objects to throwing switches - and throwing objects, I suppose - your temporal uplink can be used to interact with the game in unexpected ways. This isn't just your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. It mostly is, but when it isn't, it's vehicles and puzzles and humorous dialogue.
It does lean on humour quite a lot. Almost as much as it leans on stereotypes. Everything about a character in Future Perfect is exaggerated, from their voice to their appearance. It is the style, and I like it.
After getting a little lost, I meet my future self who gives me a key for something, and then I get a little more lost. Not unbelievably lost, but enough to start to not like this castle, with its many rooms, many guards, and many dead ends. There is only one route through it. You've just got to find it.
I literally stumble into a meeting between two blokes. I have no idea what's going on, who they are, why I was meant to be here, or when I was even given the objective to be here in the first place. As it turns out, this guy is rather important to the plot, so we better chase after him.
Can you tell Future Perfect is relentlessly paced? It's a thrill-a-minute ride, where you just don't get a chance to stop. After finding a wormhole and giving ourselves a key, we scamper through the castle some more and find Captain Ash outside a jail cell.
That's, uhh... That's who you came to rescue. Of course it is. Right 'old bean', let's get her out of here. Like TimeSplitters 2, there are some physics- or fire-based puzzles that you'll engage in now and again. Shooting a barrel makes it pour oil on the floor, and igniting that with a grenade blows a hole in the wall, such that we save the day.
Or save the day for Captain Ash, at least. Our day continues with a boss fight against a tank because we've not had enough excitement from this level yet.
That looks out of place for 1924. Some time travel shenanigans are going on here, aren't there? Other than the wormhole and whatnot. Who is responsible for this?
Ha. Humour. And that's the first level, or second after our crash landing run, complete. But there's no time to stop. Time keeps moving, forward, backward, whatever the plot calls for. One level flows right into the next, after a short loading screen, of course.
A more industrial and linear level in the late 1960s has just sneak through trainyards with groovy spy Harry Tipper. There is a crouch button to facilitate a stealthy approach and a melee attack which will drop an unsuspecting target to the floor in a single blow, but I'm missing something because my attempts at stealth always ended loudly.
More vehicles, more weaponry, more puzzles to solve, more humourous interactions between wacky characters and just like that, you're onto the next level because you can't find a nice point to stop playing Future Perfect.
Ah, there it is. That's the cliffhanger to stop on. It's not even the end of the level - another linear one, as it happens, but with good reason, being set on a train. Not too much change in weaponry available, and no vehicles to drive, but again there are puzzles to solve, mini-games to complete within time limits, and plenty of quips and witty remarks from these borderline absurd characters.
Final Word
I just wanted to keep playing. I had forgotten all about this game. Above all, I forgot that for as much as it looks and sounds like TimeSplitters, it feels a more controllable, and easier to get to grips with. It's more welcoming to newcomers, and while it doesn't have all of that TimeSplitters weirdness anymore, it does stay true to its roots, offering pastiches and parodies of film and video games to hang a time travel plot upon.
It's just great fun. I was close to complaining about why both TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect are on the list because there can't be that much difference between the two, can there? Turns out time has done a number on my memory because these titles are quite different.
And yet, thankfully, quite similar. There's more of the same for fans of the other titles in the series, certainly, including multiplayer and map-making modes, but there's so much more gameplay as well. Can you get away with playing only one of the two? Possibly, yes, but you wouldn't get a picture of the series as a whole.
A series that desperately needs a fourth instalment. Where's time travel when you need it?
Fun Facts
Fans have made more progress on a sequel than any developer has, but even user-created mods aren't yet available to play a new TimeSplitters game.
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, developed by Free Radical Design, first released in 2005.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2005, via emulation and teenage memory.