Timeshift

Coming up with mini completion projects is becoming a problem for me now as I seem to have far too many on the go. This one should be the most pressing though as it revolves around completing all the Xbox 360 games that haven’t been made backward compatible and also have an online requirement. Timeshift is one such title and after playing it, I can understand why it’s not been considered for saving for the future.

Timeshift is a very dated first-person shooter with a weak storyline. The storyline is so weak, I don’t even know what it was about come the end. Something to do with travelling through time to do some stuff. I dunno. The cutscenes were rubbish and the textures were very 2009 so other than struggling through the levels, I didn’t feel engaged enough to pay attention.

Gameplay wise, it has some original concepts with the time bending abilities. You can use time powers to either slow, pause or reverse time. Reversing time is good for storyline things and in-game puzzle solving. It is also handy for reversing the throw of grenades from enemies which was especially good at preventing death, which is needed on the hard difficulty.

The other two are simply frustrating. Time-pause runs down your ability bar really quickly but restores your health. Time-slow doesn’t drain as fast but only slows time rather than stopping it. On hard, getting shot a few times means you die and time-slow allows you to kill more enemies and hide than time-pause. This is where I started getting really annoyed with the game. There is an in-built ‘tactical awareness’ thing that auto-selects a time power depending on the situation. In combat, it auto selects time-pause. I was playing on hard and this was bad for so many reasons. The first reason is, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off if this option even existed. Secondly, on hard with the number of enemies you face, time-pause doesn’t give you enough time to do anything meaningful. Thirdly, it’s a game and you are taking a gameplay option away from me? Fuck off. You can manually select the right power but given that it’s a combat situation, pre-setting the power I want to use would be infinitely more helpful. It’s total bullshit and ruins an already average game experience.

Speaking of average, I’ve mentioned textures already but the levels are all a combination of gun-metal grey and shitty brown that adds absolutely nothing in terms of entertainment, or any other value for that matter. The final point of bullshit is the menus. They are so unresponsive that selecting anything is an episode in frustration. It all takes ages to load which doesn’t help when the game is a chore to play in the first place.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 57 Achievements

With an unimaginative game comes an unimaginative list. There are six chapters in the game and three difficulty modes. Each level has three completion achievements, one for each difficulty mode so that’s 18 of the 27 achievements that don’t involve multiplayer. There are another three for completing a level without dying on each difficulty level. This can be tricky due to the game’s ridiculous imbalance on the harder difficulties however, some of the levels at the beginning of the game are short so give you some leeway.

That only leaves six others and they are all for repeating actions with time powers or sticking grenades to enemies. No great shakes and no going out of your way. If you hate collectibles, this list is for you.

Multiplayer

As with any non-current COD or Battlefield game, the multiplayer is simply not played by anyone anymore, the reasons most likely are provided above. Thankfully, the way the multiplayer achievements are put together, only two people are required to get them all. There’s also nothing in here that is complicated to get, however a lot of it is time consuming. The biggest one is for winning 100 matches and this is where the time comes in. That said, it’s not the longest multiplayer grind by any means.

There is another bizarre one which requires you to host an online server for 48 hours. This essentially means creating a lobby for other people to play the game in and then just leaving your console on until 48 cumulative hours have passed. Pointless and ridiculous.

Downloadable Content

Because the multiplayer was so good, they decided to expand it with two additional DLC packs with extra maps. Because everyone loves extra maps!

They are just more of the same rubbish but thankfully the achievements don’t add too much extra time to the completion but do give an extra 250 points.

Timeshift was a boring completion where the main campaign was a slog and an even more boring experience than grinding out the multiplayer and it’s a sad state of affairs when it’s that way around. I can’t recommend it to anyone, even hardcore fans of the first-person shooter genre.