| Product: |
TimeSplitters 3 - Future perfect (GC) |
| Date: |
27.09.05 (611 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Highly enjoyable
Disadvantages: Single player modes are perhaps slightly too easy
This is a relatively recent first person shoot-em-up for the Gamecube (it’s also available for Xbox and PS2, but I don’t have either of those – the game’s probably much the same on the other platforms, except that they offer online play, which the GC doesn’t). As you might imagine, it’s the third in the Timesplitters series. Timesplitters 2 was probably my favourite first person shooter since Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 (the Timesplitters series seems to have been developed by the same people, and is still using Goldeneye’s game engine).
The thing that I loved about TS2 was that it’s a lot more cartoony than most similar games, and although the graphics in TS3 are rather better, the characters still look generally ludicrous. While games like Medal of Honor set a lot of store by their realism, Timesplitters has never pretended to be anything other than fanciful. (Let’s face it, going around shooting people would be a pretty nasty thing to do in real life. So a game that doesn’t try to make it look like you’re killing actual people, but still lets you kill them in their thousands, is surely to be encouraged.) As in earlier Timesplitters games, characters you will encounter include monkeys, ducks, silly-looking pirates and (my favourite) malevolent, dwarfish clowns.
The controls are easy to pick up, being very similar to other first person shooters on the GC. There are various play modes. Story mode is a big improvement over that in Timesplitters 2. You play Cortez, the muscle-bound and none-too-bright hero of the previous game. You travel through time battling the evil Timesplitters (kind of scary, vaguely reptilian creatures) and their creator, a mad scientist named Crow. Along the way you’re helped out by various characters from TS2 (although it won’t matter one jot if you never played it). Because of the time-travelling element, there’s genuine variety in the different levels, which range from a Scottish castle to a haunted mansion to a dystopian world ruled by robots. (This is a big advantage over most shoot-em-ups – Medal of Honor was pretty good, but when you’ve seen one city reduced to rubble, you’ve seen them all.)
The best thing about the story mode is that has a sense of humour, making much of the wackier implications of time travel, and the stupidity of the hero. OK, not all the jokes are particularly good, but there were times when I found myself laughing out loud. This is such a far cry from the rather tiresome testosterone-fuelled nonsense of games like Halo. The game doesn’t take itself, or any of its characters, seriously, but this doesn’t detract from its playability at all. The only complaint I have about story mode is that it’s perhaps a bit on the easy side. The hard mode wasn’t particularly challenging. Hard mode in TS2, by contrast, was so tough that I actually had to invent new swear words to hurl at it. No such problems here.
There’s also a two-player collaborative story mode. It’s OK, although it’s a radically simplified version of the single player version; the main problem is that no effort has been made to make it more difficult than single-player mode, thereby making it a bit pointless.
There’s a single-player ‘challenge’ mode, in which you have to perform various odd tasks, like killing as many monkeys as you can in a set time – doing well lets you unlock extra playable characters for multi-player (there are about 150 playable characters). These have always been the most tiresome aspect of Timesplitters games, although mercifully they’re not as hard as some in TS2 were. I managed to rattle through them all fairly quickly.
The other single player mode is arcade. In this you can either set up a battle against various computer-controlled bots, or play one of the pre-programmed battles (again, doing well in these unlocks extra characters). These are a great deal more enjoyable than the challenges, and it’s a shame that there are slightly fewer of them than there were in TS2. Playing against the computer is a lot of fun, especially if you select the more outlandish-looking characters to play against. There’s something hugely satisfying about setting a bear on fire.
But the main attraction of TS3, as it was with Goldeneye and TS2, is the multiplayer arcade mode. It’s probably my favourite multiplayer shoot-em-up – there are few things as satisfying as gunning down all your friends. It’s a lot faster than Halo and most other current generation shoot-em-ups I’ve played. You can select from a large number of weapons (machine guns, pistols, grenades etc) and a whole bunch of different game modes. The multiplayer levels are well-designed and have a lot of variety. Best of all, and this is something that I haven’t seen elsewhere, you can have up to ten computer-controlled players in your multiplayer games, too. So even if one of your friends should manage to kill you, they’ll probably find themselves blown to pieces by a monkey a few seconds later anyway. The only thing it doesn’t have is vehicles (the reason Halo 2 is so good) – actually, there is a vehicle on one of the multiplayer maps, but it isn’t much good.
A really good thing about TS3 is that it tots up the total amount of time you’ve played, how many people you’ve killed etc. This means you can both revel in your prowess (‘Hmm, I’ve beheaded 748 zombies, I’m pretty cool.’) and despair at the obvious waste of life the game represents (‘I’ve played for *how* many days?’). It even claims to measure how cruel you are, although the sole basis for this seems to be how many monkeys you’ve killed (in the game – any monkeys you’ve killed in real life aren’t included).
There’s also a mapmaker mode, in which you can create your own levels to play in multi-player. I don’t have enough patience to do this, really, and it takes up more space on your memory card, so I’ve never really done more than just try it out briefly.
Are there any disadvantages? Well, yeah. The music is pretty bad (especially in the disco level). Apart from one piece of music that sounds like a techno version of Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, the rest are pretty unbearable. And there’s a commentator on the various arcade modes who rewards you for doing well by saying things like ‘Ooh, that’s gotta hurt’ and so on. This is not funny or endearing in any way, shape or form, and anyone who thinks it is is a fool. Fortunately you can turn both music and commentator off easily enough.
One major difference between this game and TS2 is the female characters. They’re still absurdly, er, chesty, which is good, obviously. But in TS2, women would invariably cry out when you killed them in a way that suggested that they were actually quite enjoying it. Now they don’t. They just scream. This is probably for the best. I doubt that a woman would really have an orgasm if you shot her in the face with a rocket launcher, and I’m glad the game designers have chosen to acknowledge this. Possibly this represents the fact that more women are supposedly playing computer games these days, possibly one of the developers got a girlfriend. I don’t know. I always play as a female character these days, having given myself over completely to computer game transvesticism (I usually play as a tightly-packed little minx called JoBeth, and I’m pleased to report that her death scenes are quite dignified. So that’s OK then.)
Anyway, there we are. I do enjoy this game. Many’s the time my flatmate and I have stalked one another across the frozen wastes of Alaska armed only with sniper rifles. That probably wouldn’t happen without Timesplitters 3. It’s rated 15: there’s a lot of blood when you shoot people, a few quite scary bits and a fair amount of rather tawdry sexual innuendo, so this may not be suitable for youngsters. But I love it. Possibly not everyone will enjoy its obvious refusal to take itself seriously, but for me that’s the main attraction.
Made by Free Radical, distributed by EA. Supposedly £39.99, but bound to be available for less by now.
Summary: A really top notch first person shooter for Gamecube
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