TimeSplitters (PS2)

Developer:

Free Radical

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Release Date:

2000

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Systems:

PS2

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm checking out a game I haven't really played before: the original TimeSplitters for the PlayStation 2! Not Time Stalkers for the Dreamcast, that's something very different. (Just to make it more confusing, in the EU the two games came out less than two weeks apart.)

TimeSplitters was created by Free Radical Design, a company that has had a bit of a rough time of things over the years, as it's been killed off at least twice. The first time was in 2014, after they'd spent some time in disguise as Crytek UK, the second was last year after the Embracer group decided it would be better for their shareholders if we didn't get a fourth TimeSplitters game made by the original founders.

Free Radical was originally formed in early 1999 by staff that left Rare during the production of N64 FPS Perfect Dark. So it's pretty impressive that they got this out in late 2000, just a few months after Perfect Dark came out, especially as it was for a brand-new system. Rare had been focused on N64 and Game Boy games during the latter half of the 90s, but this was a launch title for the PlayStation 2. So I guess I'm going to see what Dr Doak and the GoldenEye team could do in 16 months on unfamiliar hardware.

I won't be seeing it on any other machines though, as to this day the game remains a PlayStation 2 exclusive. It's a product of that horrifying period of history where first-person shooters sometimes never got a version with mouse controls, and unlike its sequels it never made it to a system supported by backwards compatibility like the Xbox.

Alright, I'm going to check out the single-player for a bit and see if it's still fun in 2024. Assuming it was ever fun. And assuming it even has a single-player mode. It's going to really screw up my plans if it doesn't!

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The game's started off by putting me in a smoky void and bombarding me with choices to make, like whether I want to play 'Story' or 'Arcade'. I've heard rumours of a 'Challenge' mode appearing after you've finished the game, but I haven't done that so I can't play it.

I went with Story and got a choice of three maps to play, each with three difficulty levels. That's unusual for a first-person shooter, as they tend to start at the beginning and carry on from there. Even weirder is that each of the stages takes place in a different time period, with '1935 Tomb' and '1970 Chinese' set in the past, and '2005 Cyberden' set in the future. (Well, basically the present actually, as the game came out in 2000.) I am completely on board with all of this; we need more time travel games.

Okay, I'll go with Tomb first, seeing as it's the first one in the list.

Hey, it's letting me choose my character! The game shows the two choices separately, but I decided to put them both in the same lineup to save a screenshot. I guess whoever you don't pick would become player two in the split-screen co-op mode.

Right away I can tell that the game's got a cartoony style to it, with more exaggerated characters than you find in GoldenEye 007 or Perfect Dark. It probably put a few players off at the time, but it's helped make it more timeless in the long run. The screen's not telling me a thing about the characters though, like who they are, what they want to achieve in this tomb and why she's dressed like she's going on a night out in Chicago. I should probably look up to see if they play any differently...

Nope, they're the exact same. All I'm picking here is the character's appearance, and it's a first-person shooter so that's not going to make a whole lot of difference without a second person around to see them. I guess they have different pain sounds, so there's that. I'll go with Ash, because he looks like he'll be more comfortable running around.

LEVEL 1 - 1935 TOMB

Damn, 32 seconds of loading and I didn't even get an intro cutscene. Not even a bit of text telling me what I'm doing here.

By the look of the place I'm guessing I'm in Egypt. It's 1935, so it's a perfect time to discover an evil mummy or pull a Nathan Drake and do some Indiana Jones-style tomb raiding. I suppose the first thing I should do is go over and say 'hi' to the armed guards patrolling the outside.

Yeah, I kind of figured this would turn into a firefight. I'm a bit surprised that I lost half my health in a blink though; seems like I'm more fragile than James Bond or Joanna Dark. Also, I have a much cheaper-looking health bar and it's not filling back up on its own.

I don't have a crosshair, which would be a real problem if the auto-aim wasn't so good. As long as as an enemy's roughly in the centre of the screen they're going to get shot. I won't be getting many headshots this way, but the enemies go down so fast it doesn't really matter.

Okay, I'm really curious now: what the hell am I even doing here? I mean games like Doom and Quake got straight to the point as well, but they did have some story text, and by the turn of the millennium first-person shooters typically gave players context for their killing sprees. GoldenEye had pages of briefing text back in 1997!

Aha, my pause menu tells me my goal.

I have to grab an ankh and bring it back. That's it. GoldenEye and Perfect Dark give you a checklist of objectives to complete, like hacking computers, taking photos and rescuing hostages, but this time they're keeping it simple. I'm just capturing the flag.

Ah, it's still got the old GoldenEye/Perfect Dark aim-mode.

When you hold 'aim' in modern game the camera looks down the weapon's sights or at least zooms in a bit to let you fine-tune your aim. Here the camera stays put and a crosshair appears that you can slide around to be more specific about where your bullets should be delivered to. What's frustrating is that the crosshair snaps back to the centre if I let go, so I can't adjust my aim with small separate movements. Instead, I have to hold the stick in just the right place and that takes time I don't have. The game's pretty fast-paced and it seems like the whole place is aware that I'm here now.

Alright, nothing to see out here in the sand, so I guess I'm going inside the tomb then.

Damn, these cultists are all over the place and they're waiting for me. It's just one ambush after another, with dudes popping out from behind every pillar or lurking around every corner. It's a real test of reflexes.

Also, this level is a real maze of identical hallways and the game hasn't given me a map. I keep running into dead ends, which is a problem as it usually means I'm about to be shot in the ass by an enemy that crept around the corner behind me.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter (PC)

The game's got me thinking back to Serious Sam, which came out around the same time (five months later) and had a bit of an Egyptian theme as well.

Serious Sam loves to throw new things at you though, mostly things that make you run backwards around an open area. By comparison, TimeSplitters is more of a linear shooting gallery. Level one's level design is a lot more basic than Serious Sam or Goldeneye, or even Quake actually.

The good news is that I found a health kit! The bad news is it didn't take these guys long to chip it all away again. Though I reckon it'll hurt a lot more if I get too close to any of the grenades they're tossing over. It'd really help if they weren't hiding behind crates as I can't stand still and aim when I'm running away from explosions. 

Aha, the idiots blew up their own boxes! Gotta love exploding GoldenEye crates.

Whoa, game overs come at you fast in this. No little animation of the character falling over, no screen filling up with red, it's just Game Over in your face the very instant the health bar hits zero. Plus it turns out that the game has no checkpoints or saves. Or at least if it does, I haven't reached any yet. 

It's all this ramp's fault. I have to take a moment to tilt the camera when the enemies are down a ramp and the game's too fast-paced for that kind of delay! Actually, I only had like 3 pixels of health left so I was doomed anyway. I either need to get shot less or find more health kits.

6 MINUTES OF RAMPS AND AMBUSHES LATER

Hey, that looks like the ankh I'm here to grab! It's just lying there on the floor at the bottom floor of a tomb. Well, floating there. Now I just have to return it to the shrine at the start and I'm done.

I also found a box of TNT (bottom right, next to the gun) and I'm going to demonstrate my hard-earned wisdom by not using it. You don't play with explosives halfway through a level which doesn't have a checkpoint.

I am going to play with this Tommy gun though. The game's a bit GoldenEye with its weapons, as the characters can carry all of them at once, but they hold every gun one-handed and tilt them down off-screen to reload. At least the weapons are illuminated by the lights in the environment now and the shine isn't just painted on.

Oh crap, these creatures have started teleporting in everywhere now I have the ankh and their blasts really sting! I lost a fifth of my health bar with that attack.

It's not a shooting gallery anymore. Now it's that bit in an Alien Breed game when you have to race back out of the maze before everything explodes. I mean there's no timer, the tomb's not going to collapse or anything, but I'm not going to last very long in here if these things keep teleporting in and shooting me.

Man, how the hell are you supposed to remember the layout of this place? Every room and hallway looks the same! I'm just running through any door I can find and hoping that it doesn't take me back down to the dungeon's depths. I can't even use the trail of corpses I left as breadcrumbs to lead me back out as the bodies disappear.

ONE VERY LONG MINUTE LATER

DAYLIGHT! Yeah, I know the lighting isn't really selling it, but that's the blue sky out there and I'm moments away from getting out of here with my ankh.

I raced up the final ramp and found a red circle to walk onto. Level complete!

And I'm done! No ending cutscene or text, this is all I get. I brought an ankh back and TimeSplitters is satisfied with this.

In exchange, the game has rewarded me with a new Arcade level and a new Playable Character. It doesn't tell me which though. It's also given me the option to update my saved game data, as autosaving wasn't a thing at this point I guess. Hang on, Sonic 3 was autosaving back in 1994!

It's interesting that it puts so much focus on the 'New Best Time!' There are other stats (most kills without dying, longest killing spree, accuracy etc.), but they're on a different page. Lots of classic first-person shooters tell you how slow you were to reach the exit, but here it really seems like the game expects you to keep replaying a stage to improve your time. And unlike most classic FPSs, it's got a level select so you can return to any of them whenever you want. It's just a shame you also have to wait for them to load.

LEVEL 2 - 1970 CHINESE

Hey, this level's got some nice music. It's almost a shame to drown it out with gunfire.

This time I'm playing as Detective Harry Tipper and I've been told to go find another item... probably. I haven't actually checked.

I think the developers knew how hard they made their game, as there's a health kit here 15 seconds from the start. Though there's no indicator to show where the damage is coming from, so it wasn't really obvious to me where all my health was going until it occurred to me that I'm standing next to windows.

Oh damn, the game over screen took me by surprise. I'd only just stepped out of the room with the health kit as well! 

The thing is, I killed both the enemies waiting for me here, and there are no windows for people to snipe me through this time so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Aha, so I was right about them shooting me through the windows, but there was also a guy hiding behind me as well! No wonder I've been losing so much health with these enemies lurking unseen around the corners. The moral of the story: always look left and right when entering a new area. And immediately fire off a few shots, just to be safe.

I'm doing a lot better now that my health isn't leaking away due to mysterious assailants. Finding body armour also helped.

A health kit in the toilets, right where you want it. I can't see any toilet paper though. Also, the game isn't big on interactivity so I can't turn the sink on or anything like that. I can't even open doors!

I like how this level's got more variety to it than the first level, with distinctive locations that I can remember. Plus it looks quite pretty, for a PS2 launch title. Well maybe not this room, but generally.

The lighting isn't exactly Quake Engine or Unreal Engine quality though. Looks like the level designer darkened polygons using vertex colours rather than applying pre-calculated lightmaps... but I could be completely wrong about that.

You can see here that the enemies are playing fair to an extent, as they fire actual projectiles and have the capability of missing. I ran into the room like an idiot and was able to avoid a lot of the incoming hurt by staying mobile.

I wasn't able to avoid switching back to this shotgun every time I stepped on one though. A lot of games switch to a better weapon the first time you find one, but this does it every time and I'm going to have to turn auto-switching off to make it stop because it's annoying.

It turns out that I was supposed to pick up a briefcase on this level, and when I picked it up the grotesque melted zombie enemies started teleporting in right on cue. It would've been helpful if the game had also put some health next to it for me!

It's lucky I thought ahead and saved that health kit in the toilets to pick up later, as these things are really stripping my health away. I'm trying to run past, but they keep getting in the way!

At least the rooms in this Chinese restaurant are distinctive enough that I actually have some idea of how to make my way back through.

Holy crap I actually did it, made it all the way back to the red circle! Look how much health I had left.

It took me 6 minutes to beat that level, so either it was smaller than Tomb or I saved a lot of time by not wandering around lost. I beat both levels on my second try so I suppose I can't complain that 'Normal' difficulty is too hard, but it feels challenging. I don't feel like I achieved a victory here, I feel like I got very very lucky, and I don't want to push my luck by trying to beat my time.

LEVEL 3 - 2005 CYBERDEN

These bloody enemies are making me aim upwards at them! Don't they know how awkward that is? This is the very first room you walk into in the Cyberden level and those gits have already stolen half my health! Though I suppose that's nothing unusual for this game. It doesn't help when they decide to get clever and drop down to sneak up behind me.

The architecture in this place is interesting, but its so damn brown it's like it's made of cardboard. The level feels unfinished to me somehow, like they never got around to replacing the placeholder textures.

Hey, I found a thing I can activate! It doesn't look like much, but this is the first and only switch in the game, so far anyway. No idea what it just did, hope it's something good!

Oh never mind, it doesn't matter, my character just got killed. Funny thing is, I'd only just picked up a health kit. See my health in the top left? I had pretty much zero when I came in, so that's how much the health kit gave me. But then some dude crept in and started shooting me from behind and by the time I noticed my health was disappearing I didn't last long enough to figure out where the bullets were coming from.

Okay, you can't tell what's happening here at all, but this is me popping out from around a corner to fire a rocket launcher at a sentry gun. I can't really see the thing from here, but I can see the bullets it's firing at me and use them to pinpoint its position.

I hope this works, I could do with a victory. I'm only a few corridors in from the start of the level and I've already lost most of my health, again. When I'm playing a classic shooter with quicksaves or checkpoints or a hero that isn't made out of tissue paper I know that I'll make it through and I can keep chipping away at it with enthusiasm. But this always makes me feel like it's hopeless, like I don't have a chance of finishing this level and I'm wasting my time.

But I just need to survive long enough to find some health and armour and I'll be back in the game. It'd help if I could remember where I saw the pick ups on my last time through, but this is another maze-of-hallways level that I can't even visualise never mind memorise. I could probably draw you a map of Chinese, but Cyberden is a mystery to me.

I like the window-shattering effects by the way. They really nailed how a crack propagates through glass.

With the glass gone I can do a bit of sniping, make the room on the other side less of a pain when I eventually find my way in there. It's a suitable revenge for all the times that enemies have attacked me instantly from the other side of the map, stripping my health away in seconds.

Alright, I picked the level's special item (a minidisc) and then used a cunning shortcut to make it back to the start of the level... but it's missing. I mean the start of the level has gone!

Everything in Cyberden looks the same, it's another maze, but I definitely remember struggling to aim up at the enemies standing on those exact beams. This is definitely the first room you step into, so where's the bloody entrance I walked in from? Oh no, is it behind that corrugated shutter on the right? Have I just found out what that mysterious switch did?

Oh wait, hang on, if I go into that vent in front of me I can just step around the fan and that's where the red circle is. Level finally complete! It took me three tries this time and I'm so relieved that's over with now. It's done, it's beaten, the game's saved and I never have to see the Cyberden again.

Finishing this third level has given me three new levels in three new time periods to pick from! Though I beat the first set on normal difficulty so the hard modes on the second set are ghosted out. You have to earn your difficulty levels.

The game's got nine levels in total so I'm a third of the way through. Seems like a reasonable place to quit. But first I wanna look at the village level!

LEVEL 4 - 1950 VILLAGE

Hey, it's like that PlayStation 1 Medal of Honor game! Though here they had a polygon budget high enough to add little rooms behind some of the windows for sneaky enemies to shoot me through.

The level also has zombies, which are a bit more resilient than the typical gun-wielding mutant. I need to aim at their head and shoot it clean off to make them stay down. Which means I need to aim. Or I could just leave them and run off, which is far quicker.

Crap, I ran right off a pier when I was trying to grab the health kit at the end. I didn't even know you could slip off the side of things like this, I assumed there'd be an invisible wall, but you can and it's an instant game over.

On 'Easy' mode they put the item you need to grab here as well, so you can ignore the rest of the level and get the whole thing over with in one 20 second sprint. It's similar to how GoldenEye and Perfect Dark add extra objectives as you raise the difficulty, except here it's just moving the MacGuffin further from the exit.

Incidentally, the game says that that my average speed has been 8.6 mph so I've been really racing around during the 44 minutes and 49 seconds I've been playing the game. I've got 278 kills, more than the average Rambo movie, and 6 losses, also more than Rambo. But the game also claims that my favourite level is Cyberden, so maybe the whole stats page is a lie.

Well that was Story mode. It was arcady as hell with no story at all. Now I'm trying Arcade mode, which is basically multiplayer. Though you can invite some bots and play it single player if you want.

One annoying part of the game is that you have to unlock some of the levels by progressing through Story mode, so I don't have a full set here. Also, different maps feature different modes. I've got Chemical Plant highlighted right now because it's got the most game modes listed underneath it, but the others tend to be more limited in their variations of violence.

Wait, Escort is an Arcade mode? So they had the sense to learn from GoldenEye and leave out the escort objectives in single-player, but then they went and added them to the multiplayer? What?

Yep, this is an actual escort mission in actual (bot match) multiplayer. Those absolute maniacs did it.

One team has to protect a character as they walk painfully slowly through the level while the other team tries to kill them. The escortee is very fragile, but then so are all the enemies so I didn't actually find it all that hard against normal bots. I don't think it's possible to play this one against humans, players are always on the defending side, so you don't get to have fun ruining someone else's escort mission.

I've been trying the other modes as well and I'm really getting the feeling that this is a Quake III Arena / Unreal Tournament situation, where most of the effort went into making it a solid multiplayer shooter and folks playing it alone were way down the list of priorities.

There are a ton of options here to customise what weapons are on the level, the kind of bots players will be joined by etc. Though in retrospect what I should've changed here is the Score method.

I started a 'first to 20 points' team deathmatch that dragged on for 9 minutes without anyone even making it to a positive score, because the losses always outweighed the kills.

In the end I had to just quit and accept defeat at -10 points.

On the plus side I got some cryptic awards like 'Survivor', 'Pathetic Shot' and 'AC -10 Award'. Who can even guess what they mean? I bet I'd get better accuracy if I had some actual machine guns to pick from, so I'll try that next time.

Damn, I accidentally picked Assault Rifle twice and it won't let me change it without first removing the other selected weapons!

Nothing here in the weapon list seems all that intriguing to be honest, they're very conventional, though there are a lot of guns and they do have alt-fire modes to try.

I keep trying to get a screenshot which shows off some fun multiplayer action and gives you a good look at the scenery at the same time but it hasn't been going well.

At least this one shows that I'm in 1st place, which is what's really important. You can also see a radar in the top right showing me where everyone is, and arrows above the character's heads showing friend and foe. You can't see me cutting enemies down with a burst of Tommy gun fire, but it's been happening a fair amount, mostly thanks to the miracle of auto-aim. Multiplayer is way too frantic for me to start getting ideas about pressing that aim button.

Everyone's very fragile and death comes quickly, but I'm fine with that here. It's better than having to empty a whole magazine into an enemy while they're swerving around erratically. In fact the multiplayer is pretty solid even without other human players, and you have the benefit of getting the full screen to yourself!

It would probably be way better in split-screen with three friends, but you need a Multitap for that as the PS2 is the only system of its generation to only have two controller ports. It's the cool console, not the party console for babies.

Here's something Arcade mode has that you don't see in many console games: a MapMaker.

You get a selection of prefab tiles to put down and join together on a grid, with red exits connecting to red exits, and blue to blue. It doesn't show all the ramps and walkways on the grid so it's a bit hard to keep track of what you've put down, and it's all 90-degree walls like Wolfenstein 3D, but it's very intuitive and easy to use.

I wouldn't put it on the level of an actual map editor, like Build for Duke Nukem 3D, but this is far faster to use and has the benefit of working with a game controller. Well, it's beneficial for a game that never got ported from the PS2.

Oh, here's something interesting I want to mention: the game lets you assign one of five different themes to the map, which changes how all the tiles will appear in game. Though it's that big tile at the top that gets the biggest change.

With the Gothic theme the big tile becomes a large church interior with some scaffolding to climb up. But switch to the Spaceport theme...

... and it becomes a spaceship hangar! You can even go inside the ship and wander around.

The rest of the map just gets a reskin, but I thought that was cool. Sadly you can't take the spaceship out and park it inside the church, the editor's not that powerful. But the MapMaker really is the icing on the top of a fairly solid multiplayer mode.

Actually, no, the entire single-player game is probably the icing on top of the multiplayer.


CONCLUSION

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TimeSplitters and Perfect Dark are both children of GoldenEye 007 and the resemblance is obvious, they were even released in the same year, but they turned out very different from each other. Perfect Dark was made by a veteran developer using their impressive resources to push an ageing console to its limits with an innovative and cinematic single-player tied to a comprehensive multiplayer mode. TimeSplitters was made by a fledgling studio working with strange new next gen hardware and it seems they only really had the time and resources to do the second bit.

I mean TimeSplitters really shows off just how far the first-person shooter genre had come by the year 2000. Games like Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force, Deus Ex and The Operative: No One Lives Forever may seem primitive two decades on, but put them against TimeSplitters and you'll see just how sophisticated they really are! Serious Sam is a game where you run backwards from monsters and even that has more complexity than TimeSplitters' single-player. The gameplay's more of a test of memory and reflexes than it is a chance to express your soul through a ballet of creative violence. It's basic, is what I'm saying.

Every level in TimeSplitters is a maze with an object at the end of it you need to bring back, and it feels like every corner has an enemy waiting behind it ready to jump out. I got into the habit of pulling the trigger whenever I entered a room, because the auto-aim could spot enemies better than I could and there was probably someone there about to shoot me. I had to play cautiously on 'normal' as you're incredibly fragile and there are no checkpoints, though I suppose getting good would've worked just as well. It certainly encourages replays, to beat your time and unlock cheats... but I don't want to.

You can get some fun out of the story mode and the enemies are brighter than the average target in a shooting gallery, but it's not exactly showing off the power of the PlayStation 2. I mean I'm not saying that a game has to have cutscenes and scripted set pieces to be worthwhile, but TimeSplitters has less of a story than Doom does. The original one. There's absolutely no plot to get invested in, nothing is explained at all. It doesn't feel like a time travel adventure with a cast of eccentric heroes, more like a random set of locations each with two character skins that only the co-op player can see. I'll give it bonus points for variety when it comes to settings, but once I was inside a level all the corridors looked the same.

Visually TimeSplitters is nothing amazing, it's an early PS2 game, but cartoony graphics tend to age better than attempts at photorealism and I think it's got some charm to it. I'd praise the music too, but I honestly can't remember it. The soundtrack did its job, probably, but it's apparently not on the level of the sequels.

On the plus side, there are no unskippable cutscenes, no QTEs, no forced stealth missions, no turret sequences, no annoying boss fights, and no escort missions. Well, not in single-player. The multiplayer has got all kinds of stuff, that's where most of the game's depth can be found. It might be fun as well, I'm not sure, I was playing against bots. I found it to be less stressful than the single-player at least.

Really though, I just wanted to turn the game off and get back to playing something with mouse control and quicksaves. Or checkpoints at least!

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I'm not going to tell you what the next game is, but maybe you can tell me. You can also share your feelings about TimeSplitters if you want. Sing its praises if you think it deserves it, I know I didn't give the multiplayer much attention.