Fantasy violence
There are endless ways in which you can use these skills to your advantage. You can stop time, walk up to three enemies and in turn, slap two across the face with the butt of your gun, take the last one’s gun out of his hands, wait for the action to un-pause, and then watch the first two react to your melee attack moments earlier by theatrically hitting the ground, whilst the other one looks on in dismay totally unarmed.You could slow down the time during a situation where you feel out-gunned, which will allow you a few more seconds to take them all out or to run through the room to safety. You can shoot an enemy, reverse time, shoot him again and then watch the action catch up on itself as he gets treated to two rounds of shrapnel.
There are so many different ways in which to use this mechanic that the action never becomes too stale and without it TimeShift just wouldn’t have the same appeal.
Click for larger imageYou may assume that due to the power of this futuristic weapon that TimeShift is easy and you’ll be able to breeze through the levels…right? Wrong…even on Normal level, TimeShift is very tricky. But, this isn’t because the AI is fantastic and that they’re able to outsmart you time and time again. It’s because they seem to be able to kill you easier than you can kill them. You can pepper a guy with two rounds of bullets before he dies, but in half that time he can kill you. What is far stranger is that I can walk up close to an enemy and kill him with one hit from the butt of my gun, yet a round of bullets to his head may not kill him. This should give you some indication that TimeShift certainly isn’t as realistic as the likes of the Rainbow 6 series in terms of combat; it’s pure fantasy violence.
This is further demonstrated by the scripted AI, who often react fairly stupidly to the action around them, often hurtling toward you across open ground even though there are four of you poised with your weapons or they will stand in a window or a doorway or behind a crate without making any attempt to take cover when you fire at them.
Strangely enough, this is something that would normally drive me to distraction in a first person shooter, but because of the fast pace of the game (moving constantly from one enemy to the next), the multitude of enemies on the screen at any one time and the variety of fun ways in which you can use your time-shifting, it never really become a huge issue. I have to say, and I didn’t think I would be saying this after playing the poor demo, but...TimeShift is an absolute blast, despite some obvious flaws.
