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Timeshift – Hands On

by Nick Haywood on 20 August 2005, 00:00

Tags: TimeShift, Atari (EPA:ATA), Vivendi Universal Interactive (NYSE:VIV), PC, Xbox 360, FPS

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabos

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Back to the Future

Before I go into detail it’s probably a good idea if I explain the basic storyline, to give you more of an idea of what’s going on. In the near future a government agency develops a time travelling machine, capable of sending a man back in time. Unfortunately, it turns out that only a very small proportion of the human race have the right genes to not come out as scrambled meat at the other end and you play the role of one such person, Michael Swift. You are chosen by the program’s director, Heinrich Krone, to be the world’s first ‘Chrononaut’. The test mission goes off without a hitch. You travel back to 19th century and leave a device on the orders of Krone, and then you jump back to the present day.



Except now it’s not the present day you left, but an alternate present day. The science lab you left is now a prison and you’ve jumped right back into a cell. Because this is an alternate future, no-one knows who you are, it’s as if you’ve never existed. You soon figure out what has happened as in this new future, Krone is Lord Krone, ruller of the world and holds the entire planet in slavery. It turns out that like Biff in ‘Back to the Future’, the device you left in 1800’s wasn’t just an experiment, it was a holographic projector, precisely placed for Krone’s father to pick up and take home. When activated it told him, in great detail, of every major scientific breakthrough made in the 20th century, from electric light and the atomic bomb through to manned flight and world wars. Armed with this knowledge, Krone's father was able to pre-empt the original inventors’ ideas by years, becoming richer and more powerful. Knowing who would come up with the idea made it easy to head off any competition, until, stepping into his father’s place Krone was all powerful.





Of course, Krone Jr. had the forethought to warn himself of your arrival back in the new future and how you’d try and stop him. So the task for our reluctant hero is not only to stop Krone, but get to the time machine, travel back in time, stop yourself from placing the device, then get back again and stop Krone again…and now my head hurts… but it’s probably just quantum.