TimeShift

Fortunately, TimeShift is vastly superior to what was hinted at in last year’s ill-received public demo. It’s grown into a very pretty game overall — sporting a very Riddick-esque look thanks to a similar lighting model and equally shiny metal surfaces — and it runs smoothly, too. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it managed to become a great game. But at least it’s now a decent one.

The story — which follows your anonymous journey as “Guy Wearing Chrono-Suit That Can Stop, Pause, or Rewind Time” — tasks you with chasing down the evil Dr. Krone, who’s stolen the other time-shifting outfit, gone back in history, and created an oppressive alternate timeline where his will is law. On the plus side, your chrono powers are fun to abuse: it never gets old pausing time, shotgunning three bad guys in the face, and then resuming time and watching their corpses fly backward. Regrettably, though, your abilities never grow or change. And while a handful of puzzles are thrown at you throughout your journey — like having to stop time to slip by a spinning fan-blade — they’re frequently recycled over the course of the game.

Likewise, the campaign follows the Modern Book of First-Person Shooter Videogame Design to a “T.” TimeShift has six acts (the last one being a short revisit of the first, of course!), and just as you’d expect, it features a gun-turret level and a vehicle level to break up the monotony. It’s so formulaic that if it were a movie, you’d start calling out the lines in advance. Worse, the story is told in ludicrously brief cutscene clips, and it just never pays off.

Multiplayer, however, is TimeShift’s saving grace. Saber cleverly works in the time elements by packing the chrono effects into grenades: Throw one and it creates a bubble of slowed, stopped, or rewound time in which you can snare your foes. This ability truly spices up the combat, and the Meltdown Madness mode in particular is a hoot. In it, each team must hurl time grenades at their opponents’ reactor to slow it down and get their own reactor to blow up first. It’s an interesting tug-of-war that grows particularly nerve-wracking in the final minutes. The myriad host options and 14 included maps also earn a respectful tip of the cap.

With your $60 on the line, however, it’s only multiplayer that rescues TimeShift from the throes of average-dom. And with shooter heavyweights like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 to contend with, we question whether there’ll be enough gamers to easily populate TimeShift’s online options. If only Sierra could rewind time and release it earlier…