PS2 Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] TimeSplitters (Eidos, PlayStation 2, 2000)

Heir to the GoldenEye throne, with a lovely level editor in tow.

If you've never heard of TimeSplitters, you might know its spiritual predecessor: GoldenEye. Yeah, the one on N64. GoldenEye's been talked to death, but what's lesser known is that a lot of the Rare staff who worked on it went on to form Free Radical Design and produce the TimeSplitters series in the 2000s. TimeSplitters itself is better known for the story-based later entries in the series, but how's the first? I can't say no to any game with a level editor, man. It's a bit lightweight, the loading times are egregious (half a minute per level!), but if you're looking for a fast-paced four-player arena shooter for your PS2, it's got the guns and the funs.

For the story mode, you play a rather grotesquely designed guy or gal in various time periods seeking to retrieve an item from each (an ankh in a tomb in the 1930s, a briefcase in a chinese restaurant in the 1970s). When you do so, time-traveling ghouls called the TimeSplitters flood the level to try to kill you. The shooting mechanics and autoaim are very good, and the framerate is silky no matter the carnage. You're timed for each mission (and yes, there are target times that unlock cheats), but while GoldenEye had the objectives and locales from the Bond film to hang on, these levels are fun but repetitive, not much going on except a speedrun shooting gallery.

It's really in the multiplayer and level editor that TimeSplitters holds great appeal. There's various deathmatch and capture the flag modes you can play either with bots or with up to three other humans, and the matches are highly customizable and the bot AI is actually surprisingly good. MapMaker is another nicely intricate addition: you're able to put together tiles of hallways, ramps, and rooms in up to five layers, choosing where you want spawn points, gun places, flags, health and armor pickups, even per-tile lighting and color effects. It's highly engaging stuff, and provided you can get over the long load times, TimeSplitters's gunplay and MapMaker might just prove habit forming.