Timesplitters: Future Perfect Review

I had a blast playing it for most of the game. The sound design and damage animations were already great but the addition of blood splatter when enemies get shot makes the combat even more satisfying.

There is an actual overarching plot this time and it's surprisingly well written for an fps, the character interactions are funny and Cortez in general feels like he is a parody of the badass space marine protagonist that is so often seen in FPS games. It also makes repeating sections of levels compelling since it's tied to the story and it's interesting play out events you already experienced since they were a mystery and you get to eventually play it out.

The OST is still pretty good, but not as good as TS2's. I also like how there are more checkpoints and that health is actually properly spaced out throughout all the levels. I can actually play this game on Normal difficulty.

Now, the issues, first, Anya's commentary while can be funny, it can also be very grating in that she can point out the balant obvious and the game can be very hand holdy in general comapred to TS2. The Gravity Gun like arm thing barely gets enough use and felt like it didn't need to be in the game at all. The vehicle sections while decent, does feel like they were kind of borrowing from Halo for the sake of it. The titular Timesplitters are irritating to fight since their attacks always home in on you and they keep darting around the map, the penultimate sniping section being a gigantic pain in the ass because of this.

And this might not be an issue depending on your point of view, but the game's campaign feels like it adopted the Half Life approach rather than TS2's Goldeneye and Perfect Dark inspired objective system. So the single player can feel more scripted and linear when compared to TS2's approach of, "here's the level and do the objectives in mostly whatever order you want". I might prefer the Half Life style since the objective system sort of feel like it's wasting when you just miss one objective and then look around just to beat the level.

So it's personal prefrence at the end of the day, and they ended off the series well here.