Timeshift, released in 2007. It's a first person shooter that should have been great, as it has a fantastic base to build upon; it's a first person shooter where you can also control time, and whilst the game has some rather low points, it also has some very good things too. Sadly, most reviews focused on the bad, so it sold poorly, and we never received a sequel, even though a sequel could have been amazing if it built upon the good in this game.
In Timeshift, you can pause time, slow down town, and reverse time. When you reverse time, you actually reverse everything but yourself, so that anyone killed in the few moments that you rewind will come back to life, explosions reverse (they un-explode back into grenades), buildings/structures etc get undamaged, etc. When you pause the game, everything but you pauses, so people, bullets, water, even rain pauses. And if you shoot anyone when time is paused, then when time un-pauses then that person(s) reacts to the bullets, and suddenly gets shot and files back.
The time control effects are extremely well done. Unfortunately, other parts of the game vary in their quality. The weapons are great, though unfortunately you can only carry three of them at a time (though you choose which to carry, of course). Ammunition is plentiful, so you don't have to keep changing the weapons for ones you don't want, as you often have to do in Halo, for example. The graphics are great, and do a good job of portraying a parallel timeline, with buildings looking like a familiar but different Germany in the 1940s.
Here's the game's trailer. Its not great, and the city doesn't look as not-quite-real-history as in the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LODC7tt2HFE
The story though, is a real mess. The game went through at least two major rewrites, and I can't remember a first person shooter that tells it's story worse than Timeshift. The game tells it's story via very short cutscenes, which can be less than five seconds long and often offer no context for what you are seeing.
I have played through the game maybe a dozen times (it's my favourite 'bad' game, and
I *think* the story is this; that a government science department were creating a military war suit for soldiers, which is a suit or costume complete with helmet, that generates a shield to protect the wearer from bullets and explosions, has an intelligent computer built in to analyse, monitor and display real and predicted threats, and that can control and even travel through time. Dr Krone (who might be the boss of the department) kills some scientists, steals the finished time suit, sets up a bomb to destroy the building, then time jumps back to before world war 2. Moments later you, learning what the boss has done, climb into the beta suit (which might be better than the boss's suit, or worse, that's just one of the things the game doesn't tell you, just that your suit is the 'beta suit') and time jump after him, narrowly escaping the bomb's explosion, which destroys the building and kills everyone in it.
You appear in the past at an uncertain location and date, and find out that Dr Krone arrived sometime before you, and has somehow turned wherever you are (and maybe the rest of the world?) into a dictatorship, where dissenters are hunted down and killed. Your suit malfunctions, but quickly regains all of it's abilities except it can no longer travel through time. It can still control time though, so at any time you can slow, pause, or rewind time.
The resistance fighters conveniently find you, and without even questioning you, or asking to see what your face looks like behind your suit's helmet, they all trust you, and allow you to go on missions with them. They never seem to think "Well, we're fighting an enemy who seem to have better technology than us, and now here's is someone wearing better technology than we've seen, so maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't just blindly assume he's on our side?". The writing is another of the game's very low spots, in case you didn't get it...
The game is at times fantastic, but at others it suffers from boring level design, bad enemy placements, puzzles that require almost no thought and are so obviously designed to be solved by you just happening to be able to control time that it just feels so contrived. But when the game is good it is so enjoyable.
Here's a review, for anyone who might want to try it out. The game is on PC, XBox 360, and PS3. It was originally intended for the original XBox, but held back by it's very troubled development, and I keep hoping that a working version of the original XBox version would turn up, but nothing so far...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LODC7tt2HFE
Anyway, I'm not personally a fan of remasters, as I keep all of my consoles and all of my favourite PC games are backwards compatible, but I would *love* to see Timeshift re-released, but with it's flaws fixed. I know remasters usually just update the graphics, and in that case I wouldn't be too interested in a Timeshift remaster, but if they fixed Timeshift's flaws (and even better, if they added an upgrade system for the suit, to increase the length of time you can use it's time controls, your shield strength, the ammunition you can carry, etc) then I would be really happy.
It will never happen, of course. But I thought I'd mention it in this thread.
