Timeshift Preview

Time travel is one of the biggest dreams of mankind till date, the topic fuelled by many novels and propelled by the movies based on it, have kept the dream alive to date. Timeshift is one of the first person shooters from St. Petersburg, Russia-based Saber Interactive which is based totally upon Timetravel. The publishers Atari had shown the game earlier in December, but it had a different title back then, although it would remind one of Unreal Tournament 2004 at first due to similar art and architecture, but it uses a completely new engine.

The year is 2007, time travel is no longer a dream but a reality and you take on the role of Michael Swift, the world’s first “chrononaut,” He is an agent that wears an expensive time suit and travels back to 1911 on a top secret mission. Due to the butterfly effect, a tiny change made in history leads to a total rewrite of the future when he returns. Due to the changes in history an evil warlord, named Krone, has gained total control over the world, and now it’s up to you to stop him and get things back to normal.

The focus of the game is ofcourse, time. The timesuit that you wear is one hefty piece of space-age technology and provides unmatched time control powers, you will be able to slow down, pause, and rewind time at will, but only upto a certain period of time which is displayed in a meter, the meter recharges as quickly as it depletes. The difference in this game is that when you use your time powers, you’ll be immune to damage, unlike the Prince of Persia games, and hence you can use all your creativity to find various ways to handle the enemies and get past obstacles as you move towards Krone.

Puzzle Bobble

The ability to use time is not only to sneak up on enemies, but for a greater use. The game employs a string of puzzles that need time manipulation to be solved.

The rewind feature is to be used to solve most of the puzzles, the game also has many optional secrets and bonus areas that you can get to if you recognize and rewind at the right spot. Atari and Saber plan on many more different styles of puzzle that uses this, some of which will involve a bit of combat as well if they can figure out a way to make it work. For example, the player has to find a way into the base, but the front is guarded by towers with heavy machine guns and a lot of spotlights and mines, one could try to fight his way past the guards and guns, alerting the whole base, or could pause time, run past all of the lights and mines, and then hide in the shadows to decide the next move.

Graphics Galore

Timeshift is only five months into development, but has got an impressive graphics engine for it. The unique texturing and mapping features which are running in the current series of DirectX 9-capable games are working beautifully with the engine looking pretty sound and stable. Parallax Mapping, a relatively recent DirectX 9 feature that was used in the Far Cry Shader Model 3 has been introduced in this game also. This effect makes a single texture seem to have volume and depth when you look at it from different angles. The Xbox version of the game won’t have this feature, as the hardware of Xbox isn’t powerful enough to use the feature, it will only be shipped with the PC version.

Other than that, other little effect such as the heat effect around the flamethrower warping the air and the fire coming out of the gun putting the enemy on fire looked quite realistic. Inspired from the upcoming technology such as the Unreal Engine 3, Timeshift is using advanced displacement effects to give greatly enhanced detail to simplistic geometry. This means that when you walk up to a wall in the game, it would be made of minimum polygons and you would be able to see each brick protruding outward, without any ugly texture pixelation.

Guns and Glory

Saber and Atari are touting online multiplayer support for Timeshift, but they just don’t want to put in a Deathmatch mode, they plan to put in some sort of team-oriented mode, but nothing is confirmed as yet. One of the big problems is the use of time manipulation in multiplayer and they are working on it yet, more will be revealed as the game nears completion.

Your arsenal will have around 10 weapons, which include the usual Pistol, shotgun, guided rockets etc. Each weapon will have an alt-fire mode that should spice things up. For example the flamethrower shoots rapid-fire incendiary bullets in its alternate fire, which makes it easy to hit far off enemies.

All in all Timeshift seems to be a great First person shooter game. With only 5 months into developments it already has a functional AI with decent graphics and a unique concept. No date has been finalized for the release of Timeshift, but it’s supposed to be out by winter. Keep a look out for this game as it seems to be a winner.

Karan “Hamara” Bajaj