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.
Overall, I might be a little too kind towards TS1 due to the PS5 version of the game, but the game is worth playing especially when going through the series for the first time. It's easy to get done on easy mode in an hour and for Free Radical's first game on PS2 and a first in a series of games, you could do worse than this.
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