TimeSplitters 2 (Xbox) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a little more of TimeSplitters 2! Just a little bit more, not much.

TimeSplitters 2 came out in October 2002, around the same time as games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Metroid Prime and 007: Nightfire. Also No One Lives Forever 2, Red Faction II, Unreal II and Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast. It was a great time for fans of single-player first-person shooter sequels, and the multiplayer was pretty decent as well.

In fact many would argue that the best first-person console multiplayer was right here in TimeSplitters 2, especially if you didn't have an Xbox for Halo. But right now I'm more interested in the game's single-player and I've only made it up to level two so far so I need to pick up the pace.

If you want to read what I said about level 1 you should CLICK HERE. Otherwise, I'm just going to jump straight into the next level.

---

 

1932 – CHICAGO

Level two has me playing as a hardboiled 30s private detective type called Jake Fenton, who's going up against a mob boss. 

He even has his own hardboiled narration at the start, which just makes this time travel situation even more confusing. What's Cortez's role in any of this? Does he only take over when the cutscene's done and I pick up the controller?
 

By the way, you can see the game's detail texturing here, as when you get close to a wall a second texture is applied to add fine detail. The level also features some damn fine music, in my opinion.

Anyway, I checked the menu screen and it tells me I need to make sure to shoot barrels of whisky along the way. I guess there's still another year before Prohibition's over. You can just about see one of the barrels through that gap on the right, so I decided to risk giving away my presence by sniping it from here. I aimed for a headshot and sent a bullet right through the barrel's forehead, letting the whisky leak out.

Then it occurred to me that if you want all the whisky to drain out you have to put the hole at the bottom of the barrel, so I tried that instead and it worked much better!

Turns out that I've also got to protect my buddy Marco as he walks to his hideout. An escort mission, joy.

Fortunately it's not so bad, as the game can only put a few enemies on screen at once and I've plenty of time to run over and shoot them. They're not very bright or mobile.

Though one of them has found a good hiding spot for a bit of sniping and I've got no idea where their bullets are coming from. There's nothing subtle about the damage effects in this, if you're hit you'll know about it, but the health indicator only tells me that I'm being hurt, not the direction the hurt came from. 

Well at least now I know what the game over screen looks like. And that helpful kill camera reveals that I was being shot from up on a balcony somewhere. The bloody game really wants me to use that aim mode.

I do really appreciate having the kill camera though. TimeSplitters is a lot more vague about who killed you, so it's nice to have less ambiguity.

It would've been even nicer if levels had a few more checkpoints. The game started me back at the beginning, so I went through my list of objectives again from scratch.

I sniped the enemies (before they hit the alarm), I shot all the whisky barrels I found, I unloaded my Tommy gun into a car that went racing by, I met my informant, and then I got him home alive. You can do a lot better in the game once you've learned the scripted routine.

And now I have to climb another staircase.

It's times like this that I think back to Duke Nukem 3D's intricate and imaginative city levels and how they twist back around on themselves in clever ways so you don't have to put up with backtracking. Man, that game had some good level design. Oh no, I've just remembered Duke 3D's horrible space levels as well. No, get out of my head!!

When I reached the top I got a phone call telling me to check a window because people are waiting to ambush me outside.

 

So now here I am with almost zero health and no armour in a sniper battle against a dude hiding behind indestructible laundry. I've come too far to lose because of a t-shirt!

When I'd finally finished dealing with all the snipers, I headed down all the stairs and back onto the streets of Chicago. Well, the street of Chicago.

The game's definitely got some nice visuals at times. Though it's a bit weird that the moon's so dark. I feel like it should be almost as bright as the street lights. I dunno, maybe it's just cloudy.

I reached a gate at the end of the road and finally hit the checkpoint! Only took me 15 minutes this time, so either it's a shorter level than Siberia or I'm getting better.

Turns out that it's a shorter level, as I ran into the boss just 2 minutes after the checkpoint. 

I've studied my footage carefully, and it turns out that it took me 6 seconds to kill Big Tony, and he spent 3 of those seconds walking down the steps. Now this is the kind of boss fight I can appreciate!

I grabbed the Time Crystal and... nothing happened. Well, nothing except for TimeSplitter creatures teleporting in and trying to kill me. In the first game this always happens when you grab the level's item, and then you have to race through the creatures to get back to the entrance with your treasure. I feel like this game just wants me to finish all my objectives though.

Oh no I've missed a bloody whisky barrel!

Now I have to backtrack through the level with basically no health, evading infinitely spawning TimeSplitters while I look for the one barrel that doesn't have a bullet hole in it. It would've been really helpful if that checkpoint I crossed had given me a health refill.

The good news is that I eventually made it to the last barrel!

Well, almost. My dude got gunned down just as he was about to turn the corner.

Alright, I think I'm going to quit the single player and have a look at the other game types for a bit.

ARCADE MODE

'Arcade' is where you go for multiplayer, but it also features a lot of single-player botmatches to beat. You select a league (Amateur, Honorary or Elite), then you pick a series of levels, then you pick the specific level you want to play.

Or, in my case, I pick the first level, because that's the only one that isn't locked.

GameCube

Damn, I definitely remember this place. Mexican Mission is one of those deathmatch levels that'll always have a place somewhere in my brain.

I mean I don't remember the layout, or where the items spawn, or anything like that. But the exterior is iconic.

Man these bots are pulling all kinds of moves. There's one character sliding on the left and another diving at the top. I can't do any of this stuff. I can't even jump!

Man these bots are pulling all kinds of moves. There's one character sliding on the left and another diving at the top. I can't do any of this stuff. I can't even jump!

Fighting bots is a lot different to fighting story enemies, as they don't just stand there like idiots and let you shoot them. Their flinching tends to keep them in place if you can get a few shots on target, but that's not always easy without a crosshair, especially with the auto-aim being fairly weak.

On the plus side I have a radar, so I always know where the enemies are! Though not necessarily how to get over to them.

TimeSplitters Rewind

I mentioned that the game never got a PC port and this is almost entirely true. But there is a fan project in Early Access called TimeSplitters Rewind which combines elements of all three TimeSplitters games. You can download it yourself here: https://www.timesplittersrewind.com/ as it's absolutely free. (Though it's also 13.4 GB)

It definitely feels like an Early Access game made by fans in their spare time, but they're clearly talented fans who've managed to capture a lot of the games' spirit. It's very TimeSplitters, even the part where I get my ass kicked in a botmatch. I figured that mouse and keyboard would give me a huge advantage, especially with all the Doom I've been playing recently, but I clearly need more practice.

(In my defence I couldn't use my normal keyboard controls because it's got the arrow keys mapped to turning).

It can take ages to kill an enemy in multiplayer... though not if you've got the minigun!

But it helps to hang around for a second after they fall to confirm they're going to stay down. The game could've added something to let you know when an enemy's definitely dead, as you don't need this uncertainty when you're in a frantic fight for both your life and a high score.

I think I'm getting into Arcade mode now, and not just because of the high frame rate and great music (though that definitely helps). I don't know if I like it more than Perfect Dark's multiplayer, but it's just different enough to coexist without feeling like an upgrade or downgrade.

Hey, I won a prize! Doing better in Arcade mode levels leads to more awards, with things like levels, characters and game modes getting unlocked. No cosmetics or gear though, the game doesn't do that.

I like the idea of getting something for your gameplay, but personally I think that multiplayer levels and modes should all be available from the start. It's not great when you get your friends together for some old-fashioned local multiplayer, only to find that nothing's available yet and you can't play Shrink together, or Vampire or whatever.

You're not stuck with local multiplayer this time though, not these days anyway. The game came out a month too soon to make use of Xbox Live, but it does let you link consoles together to have 16 human players at once, and you can apparently use this with XLink Kai to play online!

That's what you want to see: a screen full of options that lets you fine tune your custom arcade match! I can pick the weapons, choose the bots, turn off character abilities... wait, what? Character abilities?

Wow, it turns out that each character has their own stats for accuracy, agility and stamina. I had totally forgotten that. It's optional though. Incidentally there are apparently 126 characters to play as, which is... a lot. I played the game for ages when it was new, but I'm not sure I even reached 126 matches.

CHALLENGE MODE

The third and final game type is 'Challenge', which has you doing challenges. Like shattering all the glass on the Siberia map using only grenades (with a time limit). More games should have this stuff!

 
Oh there's one other thing you can do in the game...

MAPMAKER

The MapMaker's back!

It lets you build your own level by placing prefab blocks, connecting red edges to red edges and blue to blue to join them up. Any coloured doorway not connected to another piece turns into a wall. The tool's not sophisticated enough to make anything that could be mistaken for a regular game map, it's all 90 degree turns, but it's still clever. Especially as they've upgraded it for the sequel to let you place enemies and goals, and turn it into a story level!

The biggest problem I had with the MapMaker, after playing around with it for five minutes, is that it doesn't mark the tiles containing stairs, so it's hard to know if you've put them down the right way (and hard to remember where they are). I had to flick to the other floor to see if the connector had appeared in the right place.

Alright, I'm going to play one more level of the single player. I'll let you know how it goes.

1895 - NOTRE DAME

Alright, level 3 has me playing as a 19th century Harley Quinn who has to make her way around the dark vaults of Notre Dame cathedral to rescue damsels in distress from Jacque de la Morte.

Sounds great, except for the part where I basically start off in the sewers, shooting zombies.

At least the cartoony look has aged pretty well. Plus sometimes the zombies are on fire, so that adds a bit of variety.

I'm not sure how they're teleporting in though, that's not normal zombie behaviour. In fact it feels a bit like cheating. 

A COUPLE OF MINUTES OF ZOMBIE SHOOTING LATER

Alright, I have found damsel #1! At least I hope she's the first prisoner and I haven't walked past one. It seems unlikely considering how linear these maps are, but then I walked right past a barrel on the previous stage.

Seems like she's just going to run off now that I've freed her arms, so she's safe. Plus I've spotted a second prisoner in a locked cell, so I just have to shoot the lock off and I'm already halfway done here. Though this does mean using aim mode again.

Wait, what? Failed? How?

I was going around freeing every maiden I saw. Did I walk past one? Was I too slow? Am I supposed to stay with them and escort them out? What am I doing wrong?

I gave the level a few tries, but my patience for this kind of thing ran out years ago; I get frustrated when there's time pressure, and I get angry and careless when I'm frustrated. I just want to play the shooty game, I don't want to race to protect people or play a game of 'guess why you keep losing when you get 3 minutes into the level'! At least TimeSplitters 1, for all its flaws, made it so it was only my health I needed to worry about.

Maybe I'll come back to this some other time (on easy mode perhaps). But  I think I've played enough of the game for now.

CONCLUSION

---

I've always thought of TimeSplitters 2 as being one of the best multiplayer shooters of its time. It's definitely the mode I spent the most time with back in the day, and now that I've replayed it I know why: it's because the single player mode is a bastard.

I love the premise of quantum leaping to different time periods as Riddick, but once I get there the difficulty stresses me out. How am I supposed to enjoy myself when the last checkpoint was 10-20 minutes ago and there are no health kits? I haven't played the game long enough to know if it's challenging, but it's obvious that it's punishing. Which is bad news for me, as I'm great at making mistakes. I can come back to a level and get stuck on a bit I found easy on my first attempt, especially if I'm getting frustrated. And I know the worst is yet to come. A stealth level, a timed level...

But you can get a lot better at maps once you know where everything is, what's going to happen and what you should do about it. I gave the Siberia level a second try and flew through it, barely getting hit and utterly humiliating the gunship boss at the end. Thinking back to my game overs, it was mostly a lack of information that got me. A sniper I couldn't see. A maiden getting killed, somewhere, by something. Winning seems to rely on practice as much as it does skill.

Personally though, I'd rather save the well-rehearsed performance until after I've barely scraped through with my instincts and wits, coming up with plans on the fly to deal with situations as they come up. I like beating challenges using my knowledge of the gameplay more than using my knowledge of the level. Then I can come back afterwards and use my hard-earned experience to unlock some new characters or whatever. Basically what I'm saying is that more checkpoints and fewer ways to fail because of things happening outside of my awareness would've been nice.
 
The game's definitely part of the noble GoldenEye 007 lineage, a step or two removed from what everyone else was doing in its day. This is true in multiplayer and single player this time, as unlike the first game there are actual objectives to complete, which change depending on the difficulty mode. I like the idea in theory, though making the player backtrack across the whole level hunting down a missed filing cabinet or whisky barrel is just cruel, especially if they've already killed the boss and got the time crystal!

TimeSplitters 2's levels are full of details and packed full of charm, and they've got a bit more of a story in them compared to the original TimeSplitters. The stories are all very isolated, it's like the Live A Live of first-person shooters, but it does get a lot closer to feeling like a proper time travel adventure while losing none of the variety. In fact it's got a much bigger variety of things to get frustrated doing and you're stuck doing them for much longer! Despite that, it makes the first game seem kind of redundant and I certainly found this more fun to play. You can actually survive a few hits for one thing!

The game's also got a ton of atmosphere to it, more than you might expect from its cartoony aesthetic. The fantastic soundtrack deserves a lot of the blame for that. Plus as much as I wish it had mouse control and quicksaves (I really really wish it had them), paradoxically a big part of the appeal to me is how much of a pure console shooter it is. It's got a leisurely pace and smooth analogue stick movement, and has a really polished feel to it. In fact, it's only a few steps removed from something like Resident Evil 4. It would've been fewer steps, but that floaty aiming mode is rough. Playing with a game controller doesn't have to be this awkward. I've played GoldenEye, I've played Perfect Dark, I thought I was prepared, but it's so sensitive.

Would I recommend this in 2026? Yeah, I think I would, though only if you're after a specifically sixth gen game experience. If you're in the mood for some PS2 or GameCube shooting and you've been blessed with inexhaustible reserves of patience, this will give you what you want and lots of it. I can't think of another first person shooter with so many challenges to complete. Maybe its sequel surpasses it, I can't remember, but this is one of the best versions of what it is.

I just wish I knew what the deal with the time travel is. Is Cortez possessing people or what?

---

Thanks for reading! I won't tell you what you'll be able to read next time, but I have given you a clue on the left.

If you want to tell the world what you think about TimeSplitters 2, then we have something in common! I've already had my turn though, so you should write something in the message box below.