When playing a first person shooter, have you ever wanted to bend time to your will? To annihilate an entire room of enemies before they even had time to blink? Even to freeze water and walk safely through fire? Well, TimeShift grants you the use of these abilities and more, but sadly fails to deliver a complete gaming experience.

TimeShift is set in a dystopian world where an evil scientist has used an experimental time suit to create an alternate reality where he is king - and he rules with an iron fist. Taking on the role of another doctor and donning the other time suit - the Beta Suit - you are thrown into this apocalyptic world to aid a ragtag bunch of freedom fighters, led by an elusive character who offers assistance in your struggle to bring down the dictatorial Dr. Aidan Krone. With a fairly simple but well conceived premise, TimeShift doesn't hesitate to get you straight into the action. Following a short cinematic where the laboratory housing the two time suits is destroyed (then rebuilt as time flows backwards) the suit kicks into action and hurtles you into a disorientating slue of images and sounds before landing heavily in an alternate reality. You wake up to find yourself in what looks like a rundown building, staring up at an armed man who asks you to follow him.

After completing a bunch of objectives that familiarise you with the basics, the building you're in is attacked by a Sentry - a huge, nigh on indestructible robot wielding a pair of Gatling Guns. These sentries appear periodically throughout the game, each as deadly as the last. Meeting one becomes a game of cat and mouse, using your time powers to nip around corners and avoid gunfire. After the building is attacked, you escape and find your first weapon, a simple but effective machine gun. From here you navigate through this opening level, fighting Krone's minions before being blown up and thrown through time to the next part of your journey.

The on offer map is a helpful feature in a game where information is lacking and design can be poor. It indicates enemy locations in red and objectives in blue, meaning that it's hard to get lost and that you can plan attacks ahead of time. This is important, as the amount of hired guns you face at any one time can be overwhelming. It's not long before shifting becomes available and the Beta suit can manipulate time in three ways. First up there's Slow, which reduces time to a crawl and allows you to dodge bullets and slow the movement of environmental hazards. The second function, Stop, freezes time altogether, affecting everything from enemies to fire and water, while the final function, Reverse, can open up paths that have recently been closed when used at the correct time. Each of these time powers use energy, and a blue bar in the top left corner of your HUD displays the amount of energy your Beta Suit currently has.

Each power is allocated to a button on the d-pad, which appears when you hold the left bumper, then simply selecting one of the powers activates it. One useful aspect of this system is that by tapping the left bumper the suit decides what power is needed for the situation, while holding the left bumper allows you to override this selection, which is usually the Slow power when there is no puzzle around or when in combat. Grenades work in a similar fashion, using the right bumper to activate the selection. When using a time power, the energy bar drains and when you're out of energy the power fails. Luckily the bar recharges after a few seconds between uses. This means that you can only use powers every so often, usually one power per encounter. Each power has a use in and out of combat, but mainly slowing down time is the most effective, as it lasts the longest. Stopping time means that you can steal a weapon from a frozen enemy, which only really works on individual enemy encounters rather than entire rooms full of enemies, where when time suddenly flows normally again you're often left in a very vulnerable position. The powers can look pretty impressive too, depending on what you do what you can get from them.

Using these powers at first can be tricky, as they are a must in combat. When you die, a small message appears on screen to tell you to use your time powers more effectively, which adds insult to injury and proves the importance of the feature in the gameplay. Out of combat, the time powers are used for puzzles, from stopping water (meaning you can walk over it) or more appealingly stopping a fall elevator shaft giving you time to jump to safety. These are simple puzzles that distract from the initial gameplay and are in no way necessary, especially as jumping is a finicky business. Some of the puzzles become a matter of timing more than anything, which is hard when the time powers don't last that long, making it a case if trial and error at times, rather than skill.

Graphically, TimeShift lacks the next-generation power you would expect from the 360. Bad textures and some of the animation are reminiscent of a late PlayStation 2 game. It works well enough for the desperate atmosphere the game rams down your throat, but moving from dilapidated building to dilapidated building tends to get a little monotonous. The buildings are inhabited with the rebel forces attempting to free their world from Dr. Krone, but they don't look like much. In fact, during the first level, any character that could help you is mercilessly gunned down seconds after meeting them! It's hard to understand what is going on or what you have to do during the first segments of the game and it doesn't get much better as you progress. The interface doesn't help either, as it's tiny and about as attractive as your mum's old curtains. This is a very off-putting side of the game; it's not pleasant not knowing what to do or where things are. Character dialogue is also ridiculously quiet compared to the booming noises and guitar riffs booming out from your television speakers. Thankfully you can tweak the sound options so it does get better, but not by much.

Weaponry is an obviously vital element of any first person shooter, but Timeshift's weapons aren't particularly unique. Typically all the variants you would expect are here and early on they largely consist of a machine gun, a shotgun and a pistol. This is it for most of the beginning levels, with new weapons delivered periodically. The weapons aren't really worth the wait though, as they tend to be unimpressive. The most interesting weapon uses fire as ammunition and doubles up as a flamethrower. Each weapon has two firing modes - for example the machine gun becomes a grenade launcher, which is effective but uninspiring. You can only hold three weapons at a time, which is one more than usual, but counting the second firing modes it feels more like six. Economising ammunition is important in Timeshift though, as enemies do not tend to die easily, so making sure to collect ammo from every fallen enemy is a must, unless you want to risk being reduced to using your pistol a lot of the time.

TimeShift takes around ten hours to complete, if you can stick to the story and understand what is going on. Snippets of information are fed to you during loading times and then through the bad pacing and poorly realised objectives and levels. The only things that are really memorable in TimeShift are the annoying aspects of the gameplay, plus the satisfaction of succeeding after multiple attempts at a particularly tough section.

Multiplayer is one of the more fun aspects of what the game's time-shifting abilities; utilising these powers against real life foes is both fun and satisfying. However, manipulating time is somewhat different in multiplayer; you gain access to all three types of time powers but also the ability to use a fourth. You must pick up time cartridges in the multiplayer maps to build up time power in order to use time canisters, which create a large dome wherever they land. The time manipulating effects only take place inside your dome and they affect every player, including yourself. It is quite fun to freeze an enemy player then continue to fire shotgun shell after shotgun shell while watching them bounce off the walls after time continues normally.

Some of the modes on offer are easily recognisable, like the usual Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, but there are also new modes thrown into the mix. One of the unique game modes is King of Time, where one player is nominated as the king and must keep the crown by utilising time canisters to fend off the rest. As the king you are the only one who can use time powers as well as being unaffected by them, which is good fun if you are the king but not so much fun if you're not! The balance seems a bit wrong in this mode; good players can utilise their time powers to keep their crown for the entire match. The time powers are a good element for multiplayer, but they can be an irritating factor and do take some practice to use effectively. There are a good number of multiplayer maps - fourteen in all - each scaled to include a certain amount of players, from eight to sixteen. The bigger maps include outside levels from snowy bunkers to destroyed parks, while the smaller maps take place in areas taken directly from the single player game.

Time shifting is a good example of innovation within the first person genre, but TimeShift fails to really make good use of it. The lack of direction in single player hinders the experience and the linear gameplay hurtles you onwards in fits and starts. Trial and error seems to be the order of the day here, using the right time powers at the right time needs precise timing to be effective and the placing of the puzzles detracts from the action in a way that can be an aggravating. TimeShift is a decent enough shooter with all the core aspects you would expect, but its unbalanced game mechanics and loose controls that makes it a chore to play in parts. An acquired taste, but one that FPS fans would do well to take a look at and see if it's a flavour that they're partial to.

Reviewed by Oliver Dearn for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).