Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Free Radical Design
Publisher: Eidos Interactive

The late 90s heralded the ferocious PC 3D accelerator wars. Engines such as "Quake" and "Unreal" wielded against one another texture filtering, floors-above-floors, transparent water, undistorted free looking, lens flares, faux-crepuscular rays, volumetric fog, and much more. Eventually the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 brought the console-side up to speed with games like this one: TimeSplitters has transparent windows plus water, maps with reasonable geometric sophistication, lens flares, fairly high detail player models, and-- best of all-- a butter smooth framerate. Varied art direction sees ancient pyramids, futuristic space ships, and everything in between brought to life with crisp, high resolution textures. It can even be played in four-player split screen, without too much of a detriment to performance.

Free Radical Design was essentially a lift-and-shift of the "GoldenEye" and "Perfect Dark" development teams. They even brought along composer Graeme Norgate, who was tasked with delivering a wide array of music to fit the disparate stage settings. He's got some ancient Egyptian motifs, Hammond organ-filled light techno stuff, and some spaceship keyboard music with distinctive female vocal elements. None of it is "instant classic" material, but it's interesting enough and provides an adequate backdrop to the proceedings. The sound effects are "good enough", but could have been made a little more notable, to better communicate the game state to the players, especially in multi-player.

TimeSplitters has an immediately-recognizable control scheme to modern game players: the left analog stick moves the character, while the right one rotates the camera. Superb "labor of love" programming was done to snap the rotation back to a neutral view, without being overly obtrusive. There is a very tasteful auto-aim feature, plus a "manual aim" feature activated by holding L2-- necessary when shooting the heads off of those darned zombie enemies! The game's level design is solid overall, but a little inconsistent: the pyramid map is a dreadful maze, while by contrast the China level is top-notch for both single player and deathmatch.

The real parlor trick of this game is its integrated map editor: yes, map editing on a console-- whereby the player can link together pre-fab rooms, plus place items and set the lighting, then save the level to memory card. "Doom 2016" wholesale took its map editor from TimeSplitters, decades after the fact. And that is a microcosm of what makes TimeSplitters such an interesting game. Designed from scratch for the PlayStation 2, it has phenomenal performance, and the whole thing is designed to be customizable for up to four players, with complete bot support! It tracks detailed life-time statistics for each player via a "login" system. You can even customize the weapon, bot sets and game modes. Due to memory limitations, TimeSplitters is not as sophisticated "Quake 3" or "Unreal Tournament" in general-- but even for PC players, it has a lot to offer as a well-rounded, complete first-person arena-style shooter, and is a worthy follow-up to the team's N64 classics.