Timesplitters 2

Base on the first easy-to-play, bubblegum blaster, Free Radical's second first-person shooter, like all good sequels, takes the core concept and expands upon it. The central themes for TimeSplitters were speed, beauty and multiplayer goodness. TimeSplitters 2 does everything in its power to present these qualities, while simultaneously offering a game that's also a fun single-player title loaded with rewards, cheats, extra characters and modes of play. It's still blazingly fast and pretty, running constantly at 60 frames per second, with no noticeable slowdown, and packed with a Story mode organized by difficulty levels, enabling players to amuse themselves with entirely new objectives, sectors of play, and more difficult AI. And the load times are all speedy short. Though sadly missing the much-anticipated online function Eidos once promised, TimeSplitters 2 is still an electrifying first-person shooter, crafted with care, humor and intelligence. Offering a healthy set of modes, TimeSplitters 2 also gives gamers a wealth of options. Under Options players can tweak their controls, audio and video options, view cutscenes, see cheats, trailers and credits. The most robust of these is Player options. Players can tweak six different controller setups, including Custom, alter "Preferences," including items such as turning on or off auto aim, inverse look, vibration, and view statistics, which is a funny little jaunt in itself. These guys were always sticklers for statistics, and TimeSplitters 2 is no exception. Players can check the statistics of standard things such as the time they have played, distance traveled, total games, total kills, accuracy, etc. The more eccentric items are what we were after, and these little stats pleased me sinfully. You can check "Insomnia" (the longest stretch of time played in one sitting), "Average speed," melons burst, animal cruelty, limbs detached, head knocked off, UFOs spotted, and for a touch of Grand Theft Auto, Longest Killing Spree. Also worth noting are the Arcade Awards, given for players of the Challenge mode, and Gallery, which shows how many of the 126 characters are playable in the game. These include standard AI dummies, bosses, lead characters, and dozens of others, giving this game a slew of incentives for replaying it again and again. Single-Player ModeWhat the first TimeSplitters sorely missed was a single-player mode worth playing. The game featured one, but it was essentially capture the flag, and it was substantially more difficult than it was worth. TimeSplitters 2, on the other hand, delivers on the promise of a meaty single-player experience by bringing 10 levels to the table. What? Only 10 levels? True, that isn't generous. But these 10 levels are structured much in the same way Goldeneye 007 was -- with new objectives added for each new difficulty level, more locations opened up and challenges to meet. Beat the game on the relatively easy "Easy" level, and then play through on medium, and all of a sudden the map you knew has grown, the passages you take altered, and the enemies not only harder to kill, but smarter, too. By finishing the game on "Easy" you have essentially missed 30-40% of the game. It's not like beating Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racconus and missing a few bottles. Here, you simply miss out on huge sections of addictive gameplay. The new difficulty levels add substantially fulfilling challenges that had this gamer swearing, cussing, and prophesizing the end of his gaming career if he didn't beat the Atom Smasher level over the weekend. Unlike Red Faction 2, THQ's story-driven first-person shooter, TimeSplitters 2 is not story-driven. It's an objective-based game. The story does indeed exist, but it's little more than say, the story provided for Doom, which is to say, the story is not where it's at. You follow the plot of an elite squad of military personnel bent on chasing the evil TimeSplitters through time, capturing crystals key to controlling time, and at the same time, history. In the 10 basic levels, spread out over history, players fight their way to the time crystal, beat up bosses, sometimes more than one in a level, and then find the warp hole back to the ship in which your two lead characters, Sgt. Cortez and Corp Hart, are harbored. In each time level, you take on the roles of select characters, into which Sgt. Cortez or Corp Hart take form. I found little depth in the characters, little reason to like them -- other than that they are apparently saving the world from some abstract disaster -- and felt no real compassion for them. Why do I care about them? Who are they really? How do they fit into the big picture of the world? These are not issues addressed in TimeSplitters 2 because the story is essentially irrelevant. But honestly, when I look back at Rare's blockbuster spy game on Nintendo 64, was that game really story driven? Nah. It was just like this game, objective-driven. So, TimeSplitters 2 does what it sets out to do with this story, and for the most part it succeeds. The Story mode offers 10 levels, all based in different time periods, and while some are better than others, they're all relatively medium in length (longer, obviously, when you play the medium and hard level). The levels include 1990 Siberia, 1932 Chicago, 1895 Notre Dame, 2280 Return to Planet X, NeoTokyo, 1858 Wild West, 1972 Atom Smasher, 1920 Aztec Ruins, 2315 Robot Factory, 2401 Space Station. Each of the 10 levels offers something different. The first level, 1990 Siberia, is clearly a parody to the first level of Goldeneye, an "answer" to those fiendish Bond fans who tried so desperately to reach that little island on the other side of the dam in that game's first level. It's also probably the largest and best level of the game, unifying careful sniping, stealth and straight-out action elements into one nearly perfect level. Chicago is also superb in its combination of stealth and sniping. I also loved the third level Notre Dame, thanks to the appearance of (minor SPOILERS ahead) the hunchback of Notre Dame and two bosses. Both Atom Smasher and Aztec Ruins were also handled superbly. But some levels didn¿t satisfy at all. At the same time Atom Smasher is a classic parody of any late '60s/early '70s Bond film, it's a devil of a level to beat, creating great frustration and annoyance to this gamer -- mostly because the AI makes a substantial jump in toughness at this level. Then there are levels such as Return to Planet X, which are simply dull and uninspired, providing little of what Free Radical does best. And while Wild West was a "hoot" to play for a few minutes, it was surprisingly short, unimaginative and lacking in the fun department. And call it what you will, but NeoTokyo is such a brazen rip-off/parody of a Perfect Dark level, fans of that game are sure to split over either loving or hating it. Other modes of play include Arcade (League, Custom, and Network), Challenge (skill and time based challenges), and the formidable Mapmaker mode (which I'll talk about in a bit). Also, and this has become a much more popular concept over the years, the Story mode is playable with two players in Co-op mode, another bonus. Challenge is fun and entertaining; it's great for people to gather around and compete over, offering time and skill based challenges. One level (Glass Smash: Pane in the Neck) requires you to knock out all of the windows from the Siberia level using a grenade launcher: Beat it in less than 18 seconds and win a gold metal. Beat it in less than 30, and win a silver, and less than 1 minute for a bronze. These modes mix single and multiplayer values together to create an imaginative party atmosphere, but they can be played entirely alone, too.