Timesplitters(2000) Review

I played TS2 and 3 and the reason why I'm playing this game at all is because it recently came to PS Premium Classics and now that it's on there, I decided to give it a look.

Outside of the camera control being inverted which I fixed in the PS5's emulation menu, I barely had an issues with the controls other than the fact that you can't open doors which is weird since I'm so used to FPS games giving you the ability to do it, I got lost on the first level because I thought you could open doors but you can't.

Other than that, the game is "fine". One thing I find fascinating about it is that the game feels like a "speedrun" shooter of sorts where you have to memorize enemy locations and know exactly where many of them are mitigate damage, the lack of a story and the fact that all of the levels can be beaten under 5 minute drives home this fact. There are also no checkpoints and that is probably there to counteract that you can beat the game in under an hour all though there is save states and rewind on PS5 to tone down potential frustration.

Sound design and damage animations are great especially for a game with a less realistic art style. Weapons have great firing sounds and damage animations feel decently exaggerated. The music is also really good and gets me immersed into the levels.

However there are issues like how enemies can kill you very quickly if you don't know the exact positions on where they are going to hit you and chances are if you were playing this on base PS2 hardware, many of your deaths came from getting attacked from random places not knowing where the enemies hit you. This goes triple for the Mansion level where melee enemies and firearm enemies can rip your health to shreds in seconds if you don't where exactly they are going to spawn and attack you from. That and the zombies can be very tedious to dispatch since you have to rely on the game's clunky manual aiming mechanic to dismember their heads or else they just keep coming back no matter how much ammo you pour into them. There is moments where you have to use precision aim on the sniper but easy mode meant that I could use it less since I can take more damage.

Levels also play out the same way, where you get an item and get to a specific part of the map, then it ends, I thought they were going to do what TS2 did where more objectives get added on higher difficulties but only the Mansion did this. Which was disappointing. The level design like the Planet X and Mansion can be a little confusing at time but if you have played games like this where they aren't linear and don't overly hold your hand, navigating them should be fine.

Edit:

I tried to play some of the game again on Normal again due to the recent trophy support being added and you need to play on Normal difficulty and above to get the Story trophies.

My impression of normal difficulty has changed my opinion on the game. On easy, the game was decent if nothing special but on normal, the game is pretty bad.

On normal, enemies can rip your health bar to shreds within a few a shots and many of them carry hitscan guns so if you walk into an enemy's line of sight, chances are you will lose a decent amount of health if you fight more than 1 enemy, on top of the game barely having health packs or any form of health drops by enemies. You can't carry health packs either.

So in order to be effective at this game at all, you need to memorize every enemy location and take potshots from cover to get anywhere, this would be fine if enemies didn't take some like mummies didn't take a decent amount of damage to die and requires headshots to permenantly kill.

You better hope not to reload in the middle of a fire fight since enemies will knock off chunks off you health even more. I don't complain about reloading in games but it just feels like a major inconvience in TS1 on normal difficulty. The fact that enemies can attack you from behind, and attack while right next to you before you can even center the camera in time to mitigate damage on top of the enemy count on normal being higher just adds insult to injury when it comes to reloading. The monsters keep spawning at random times and can often catch you off guard.

Overall, TS1 is a strange game, if you play on easy, there is a decent and functional shooter here but on anything higher the game is just not very enjoyable unless if you enjoy the way many late 90s and early 00s games designed in that you have to memorize health packs and enemy placements to get anywhere in the level. I'm not into that style of design and anything about easy just exposes the game's issues even more.