It's common for action games to borrow from one another as new ideas emerge and higher standards are set, but TimeShift is a bit more blunt about it than most. It's a first person shooter in which you play a mysterious quantum physicist wearing an advanced hazard suit (Half-Life) with a recharging shield and built-in female AI that helps guide you around (Halo). The suit also gives you the ability to manipulate time (Prince of Persia). The game takes place in a war torn dystopia full of jackbooted thugs and robots, with a reassuring overseer broadcasting propaganda on massive screens (Half-Life 2). You run from checkpoint to checkpoint, sometimes with a squad following, attempting to overrun Nazi-esque bunkers and liberate facilities (Call of Duty). Even the weapons feel more than a little familiar, from the standard SMG with under-slung grenade launcher to the blue-glowing 'clutch' grenades that can be stuck to enemies!

This checklist of features taken from other games has at least been well implemented though, so TimeShift certainly isn't a bad game, even if it does struggle to be unique. To be fair, the actual time shifting adds a new twist in that when you reverse time (you can also pause and slow it) you are unaffected, leading to some bizarre situations and even a few puzzles - although they are few and far between. It's an enjoyable shooter with a decent campaign, but both the story and the time manipulation elements - i.e. the bits that actually do make the game unique - are a little too underutilized. The between level cut scenes seem to have an average running time of about five seconds and in the end almost nothing becomes clearer beyond what was already obvious - you're chasing a rogue scientist back through time to undo his mischief, a la Timecop.

In the game's many firefights you'll want to slow down time, enabling you to run around causing carnage with near invincibility. You can only do this in short bursts of course - shorter still if you choose to stop time entirely. Doing so enables you to pull the weapons out of enemies' hands, tag several bad guys with explosives or even just run away and hide for a while. Reversing time is of little use in combat beyond unsticking grenades from yourself, since you can't cause any damage (and can in fact undo it, but not to yourself), but you can do things like jump on a train, ride it backwards, then jump off again at the previous stop. Puzzles like these come in several forms, most often requiring you to stop or slow down time to avoid deadly traps or push two switches at once, but with the excellent Portal having so dramatically raised the bar for FPS puzzle dynamics, the simplicity of TimeShift's approach (it even suggests which power to use) will likely leave you feeling seriously under-challenged, yet you might sometimes find yourself stuck only to realize that the answer was right in front of you all along.

The story doesn't really help the game out either. You have one of the two suits that can stop, slow down, or rewind time, only yours is screwing up a bit. Instead of just wearing the suit, you're sent to a future time where the man who stole the other of the two suits has formed an army and is taking over the world. Dr. Krone, better known as Dr. Generic Megalomaniacal Villain, is your nemesis and although the story is good at first, you'll care less and less with each abruptly short cut scene. With that said, it doesn't really make sense that both you and Dr. Krone are able to go back and forward a matter of years, when during the gameplay you can only stop, rewind and slow down time for a matter of seconds. Somewhat odd, no? [As Chief Miles O'Brien once said in tandem with his near-future self, "I hate temporal mechanics!" Trek Ed].

Unlike the game's original unreleased incarnation, TimeShift's graphics engine looks really good, and it's clear that a lot of thought has gone into how the world might appear in slow motion or paused entirely. Things like explosions, weapon flashes, destructible objects and even raindrops are more than just the generic effects you might expect. Still, by the end of the single player campaign, which totals around nine to ten hours, you'll feel like you've seen and done it all just a little too much, and be disappointed that the premise's excellent potential has gone somewhat unfulfilled. Other than a handful of puzzles, time reversal doesn't really have much use and your suit's apparent ability to jump to alternate points in time doesn't come into play either, so you're stuck in the same industrial-looking environments for the whole game.

Your suit's awesome powers don't get upgraded during the game, but you'll find they have a slightly unbalancing effect on the gameplay anyway. In the corridor sections the suit makes it all too easy to pause time, kill a few enemies and move on, while in the large outdoor battles the only real tactic available is to sit behind a rock, plinking away with an explosive crossbow while some rebel fighter irritatingly keeps telling you to get a move on. Don't get me wrong, time manipulation is fun, but it could and probably should be more fun than it is. There's a slight feeling that TimeShift doesn't quite know what it wants to be; there are times when it teases you with what could have been awesome stealth scenarios and others when it tries to pressure you into rushing, but doesn't actually give you a time limit.

The multiplayer is pretty solid, but won't be going up against the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. The most interesting aspect is that the time powers have been converted to grenade form, allowing you to create time bubbles that affect any player caught within them. It's another bold and original idea, and while not enough to carry the online experience, it at least gives you a reason to play it. As well as standard deathmatch, there's a King of Time mode, where one player is king and can't be affected by time powers, and a team-based mode in which the aim is to use time grenades to assault the enemy team's base and slow their machinery down. You also get Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, 1 Vs. 1 and the ambitious Meltdown Madness, where each team has their own reactor and you want your reactor to blow up first! So you go to the other team's reactor and throw time bombs at it to slow down how long it will take to blow. It's really fun and can get pretty intense in the last minute or so. Overall the multiplayer alone will make TimeShift worth your while if you're hooked up for Live play - it's fast, fun and frantic!

By sheer plagiarism, TimeShift manages to pass itself off as a solidly entertaining FPS. It has a fun albeit familiar selection of weapons, enjoyable combat, good looking graphics, decent AI and just enough meat on its bones to keep most FPS fans satisfied. The greatest shame is that developer Saber Interactive weren't bold or ambitious enough to really capitalize on the one or two good ideas they actually had of their own, and that's ultimately the difference between a game that is just good and a game that is great. Oh, and I'm taking into consideration the ending of the game, which is one of the most anti-climactic since those old NES games where you'd beat the insanely hard game and all you'd get is your character looking at the sunset! Although it does set it up for a sequel, so my only question is this: can I fast forward time and play it now?

Reviewed by James Fanciullo for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).