If you got hold of a suit that allowed you to travel back in time, what would you do with it? Would you attempt to go back through history and avert disasters, perhaps by killing Hitler before he began his conquest or attempting to prevent the atrocities of 9/11? Would you attempt to avert your own personal disasters, like warning yourself not to go on that blind date? Would you go back just one day with the results of yesterday's horse races memorised? Or perhaps just go back and check out the time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, or watch the rise and fall of ancient civilisations. There's certainly no shortage of things to do when you've got your own time machine, but mad scientist Krone is your typical megalomaniac - he's headed into the past and used his technology from the future to set himself up as ruler of the world.

The year is 1939 and as a scientist with the only other time suit in existence - the Beta Suit - you have fallen into a paradox in Earth's past where Krone, using his Alpha Suit, has taken over the whole planet. A group of resistance fighters calling themselves the Occupants have arisen to attempt to stop Krone, but his armies are so formidable that their resistance is futile - that is until you come to lend them a hand with your unique abilities. What follows is a large-scale adventure that sees you working your way through a range of sprawling complexes and outdoor locations as you help the Occupants regain their footing and overthrow the insane dictator.

There's no disputing that TimeShift is heavy on the action with a great atmosphere, as demonstrated by the opening level, where you're led through an Occupant base that's under attack. As you follow your new allies through the ruined buildings, they fall one by one, killed by the enemy troops converging on their position. After dodging one of the near indestructible sentinels, heavily armoured mechanical walkers, and using your newly discovered time-manipulation abilities to take out some troops, it's onto one of the first of a series of missions with multiple objectives.

Everything in TimeShift looks pretty cool; the pseudo futuristic weapons look nice and their effects are excellent, while the scenery is always brimming with detail, whether you're in the midst of a huge factory or speeding along mountain paths in a buggy that can go hair-raisingly fast. The outdoor locations are particularly impressive, with sweeping, atmospheric vistas that stretch out far into the distance. There's a good range of locations too - just when you're in danger of getting tired of the current scenery, you complete your mission and move onto the next area.

However, the jewel in the graphical crown of TimeShift is without doubt the time altering effects. With the power to not only slow time down to a crawl, but stop it completely and reverse it as well, TimeShift takes the slow motion bullet time concept, which has been done very well in many titles such as Max Payne, Enter the Matrix, F.E.A.R. and more recently Stranglehold, and evolves it one step further. Slowing down time puts everything into extreme slow motion, so you can zip around at high speed while enemies can barely react to your movements, allowing you to dodge their bullets and blast them before they know what's happening. Watching their lovingly crafted bodies go flying into the air in full rag doll glory while time is slowed down is one of the highlights of the experience. The explosions in particular look fantastic in slow motion and blood splatters everywhere; TimeShift earns its mature rating, especially when you stick a grenade to a soldier or blow them up with a rocket and watch their body literally explode into pieces in a slowed down shower of blood. All the sound slows down too, so enemy weapons sound slower, as do their voices. The rain effects of the opening level look particularly great in slow motion too, and when time is stopped altogether it's a very eerie and impressive effect.

While slowing time is the power you'll mainly be using during the game, your ability to stop time for short periods is extremely useful. If you arrive in an area full of patrolling guards who haven't spotted you yet, you can stop time, run out of cover, blast an enemy, then hide again before time restarts. All the enemies see is that one or more of their number have just inexplicably dropped dead before their very eyes - and it scares the hell out of them! It's a nice touch that both your enemies and allies often comment when they see you zipping around in a blur or even teleporting from one spot to another (which is how it appears from their perspective). Cries of "am I seeing this?" "What the hell just happened?" and "That's impossible!" can be heard regularly. When you stop time, damage accumulates but bodies don't react until time restarts - so you can go and blast three soldiers at point blank with your shotgun, then watch as time restarts and all three of them fly back simultaneously. I particularly enjoyed blasting multiple troops from different angles, then restarting time to watch them all fly off in different directions! You can also stop time to dodge weapons fire and take cover, vanishing from your enemies' view, and when time is frozen you can run up to an enemy and steal their weapon, then hear the surprised cries as they realise their gun has gone before blasting them into oblivion with it.

Reversing time meanwhile is mainly relegated to use for puzzle solving (although you can reverse time to avoid dying from a sticky grenade) - and to TimeShift's credit, there's a nice range of environmental puzzles spread out across the whole game. Sometimes you might need to reverse time to cause a collapsed bridge to reform itself, giving you a few seconds to run across it before it collapses again. Or how about reversing time to cause a giant fan to blow air up rather than sucking it down, launching you up a shaft to gain access to the next level? Time stopping and slowing is also used when you need to flick two levers in synchronisation, and for other little puzzles that crop up now and again, like dashing through a minefield so quickly that the exploding mines don't take you out.

You'll need to make full use of your powers too - even on the medium of three difficulty settings, the enemies are very tough, heavily armoured and capable of taking a barrage of fire before they drop. You can see why the Occupants have had such a hard time resisting Krone's rise to power - you need to use your powers in each and every assault or you will die very quickly indeed. Fortunately there are regular autosave checkpoints and you can save at any time you like, too, meaning that when you do die (and you will), you usually don't go back too far. You'll need to use careful strategies too because your time bar is limited; you get perhaps five seconds of time stopping and ten to fifteen of slow motion before your bar runs out, after which it takes twelve seconds to fully recharge. You can use it again before the bar is filled, but obviously you'll have less time to make your move. As a result, you'll soon adapt to slowing time, rushing out and blasting a few bad guys, then taking cover again before the flow of time returns to normal.

The enemies are pretty intelligent too - they'll attempt to flank you, they're very accurate and they don't let up, pounding your with a barrage of shots then taking cover when they're under fire. Fortunately you've got a useful array of weapons at your disposal, each with a secondary function. Even the basic pistol is pretty handy and shots to the head work quicker than ones to the armoured body, while the assault rifle you gain can fire grenades and the shotgun has an extra powerful blast as a secondary function - definitely one of the most satisfying shotguns I've used in a while. The sniper rifle allows you to zoom in for one-hit head shots and the rockets can be guided to their target by your crosshairs, with more unusual weaponry taking the form of a rapid fire laser weapon with a lethal charged blast as its secondary fire, a surge gun that you only get near the end of the game with a beam of lethal electricity or an even more deadly ball, a gun that shoots flaming projectiles and doubles as a flamethrower, and the incredibly useful Thunderbolt, a crossbow that fires explosive arrows with a high zoom for those long distance kills.

While this all sounds pretty great so far, the main problem with TimeShift is that despite its unusual time-bending mechanics, there's nothing that particularly stands out within the game. It's a good, solid shooter that will provide you hours of enjoyment in single player, yet there's nothing that really blows you away - and with the likes of Call of Duty 4 and The Orange Box as competition, TimeShift simply doesn't measure up. Again, while the graphics and sound are pretty good and definitely of next-gen quality, they're not that much of a leap from the previous generation and while looking really nice in places, don't impress like other PS3 titles, even PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. The theme of the alternate past setting of 1939 is well realised and unique, combining advanced technology with a retro look and style for tanks, helicopters, factories and weapons, while zeppelins and gliders also come into play - yet it doesn't feel all that different to the average shooter and doesn't quite stand out enough to give TimeShift a unique identity. The weapons meanwhile are varied enough and fun to use, but none of them really make you go "wow, now that is one cool gun!" Well, apart from the shotgun!

The online multiplayer for up to sixteen people makes a big effort however, with fourteen maps of varying sizes and designs, packed with weapons to find and use (you can carry up to three different weapons and several types of grenade too, including the blue, glowing clutch grenade that sticks on contact - I wonder where they got that idea from!) Here you collect Chrono Grenades that you throw out to create an area of effect for time stopping or slowing, which affects everyone who is caught inside it while it lasts. It's a unique idea and the availability of power-ups that make you resistant to time altering effects for a short time, plus the ability to generate a Time Shield that slows incoming fire and again makes you immune to time effects, really adds to the variety on offer in multiplayer. As well as the usual Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, the more unusual modes are comprised of One-on-One, King of Time and Meltdown Madness. King of Time sees the player with the Time Sphere impervious to time effects while the others seek to take him or her down and gain the sphere for themselves, although this can be quite unbalanced in favour of the King. Meltdown Madness features two machines that are counting down to zero - you must throw grenades at the enemy's machine to slow it down so that yours reaches zero first.

While this all sounds great in theory, I wish you good luck in getting into a match - I can't actually tell you how much fun the above modes are because I never managed to play a single game. On at least four different occasions I tried for coming up to an hour each time to get into a game, a process that consisted of me bringing up a list of the available games and waiting for the server to connect, only for it to timeout. On the odd occasion I did actually manage to connect to a game, I was left in limbo waiting for the server with a tantalising view of the map I was about to play, only for it to eventually (after several minutes) timeout and boot me back to the main multiplayer menu. I have no idea how widespread this problem is, but the number of players spread across the limited number of games each time I logged in were well under one hundred, so your chances of getting much out of the multiplayer mode until this problem is fixed are slim. It can't be to do with my connection either, because I'm on Xbox Live all the time for good old Halo 3!

TimeShift is an enjoyable shooter that's worth a look for fans of the genre, but with a warning that it's not as good as the majority of its competition. Its time-altering mechanics add a lot to what is otherwise fairly standard gameplay with standard weapons in a game world that's not particularly distinctive, and the end result is a game that's good but never quite rises to greatness, yet in some places comes tantalisingly close. I can't recommend it above the likes of CoD 4 and The Orange Box, but if you've exhausted those and are looking for something else then TimeShift will make for a fun weekend rental or, if you can actually get online, multiplayer modes that are more than just the usual fragfest.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).