Oct 10, 2007

His head comes apart in a haze of red and gore, his knees crumple and he’s dead. Then the voodoo happens: his collapsed legs unfold in an impossible fashion, his body straightens and the gobs of matter and the red mist reform into a head. There’s something disquieting about watching someone’s head reforming in front of you.

TimeShift is a first-person shooter where the passage of time is under your control. From within your timesuit you can slow, stop and reverse the temporal flow, while being protected from your meddling. So while the world literally revolves around you, you can still move through it as normal. You can, if you choose, reverse an enemy back to life and kill him again in a more hideous fashion.

Time travel is, unsurprisingly, a huge factor in the story, which involves you chasing a timesuit-wearing madman into another dimension, one created by his own machinations in the past. He’s turned the world into a grey mire ruled by his wormhole-addled brain.

The timesuit’s powers elevate this astonishingly pretty game into a series of gleeful battles and puzzles. Simple fights expand into intriguing conundrums, where the only way past, say, a collapsing bridge, is to reverse back before the point of collapse, slow or stop time and then cross it.