Review By: Joe Rolfe
Developer:	Free Radical
Publisher:	Eidos
# of Players:	1-4
Genre:	First-person Shooter
ESRB:	Teen
Date Posted:	01-04-00

…Which would be the multiplayer. Let it be known: the multiplayer will most likely not impress veterans of online death-matching games, such as Team Fortress and the Quake/Unreal series. Due in part to the game's strait-up kill-everything-in-sight approach, TimeSplitters does not take quite the amount of skill to win against friends an AI bots as the previous games mentioned. You really don't have to worry about pre-meditated plans and strategies to play the game.

However, does that mean TS is a pushover in the multiplayer department? Hell, no! We are talking about former Goldeneye designers here, after all. Featuring 24 different levels of play and a plethora of wacky, stereotyped characters, playing a game with multiple friends has hardly ever been done better on a console before. As I said before, the actual level design and construction won't surprise many (and most don't come close to the level of brilliance featured in UT), but the sense and feeling of Goldeneye subliminally leeks through when gamers sit down and play TimeSplitter's expanded areas. Modes vary from the expected Death-match and Capture the Bag to an interesting Knockout and Last Man Standing feature. Within each game type players can customize basically the same set of rules that were available in Goldeneye, plus change the amount of players per team, which colors of teams and different levels of AI difficulty (down to each individual bot!) When put together, TS has the best multiplayer in an action game seen since Nintendo's Perfect Dark was released earlier in 2000. It's a well designed, well executed mode from Free Radical that should keep groups of PS2 players interested for quite some times.

Even if you get bored with the mass number of maps, Free Radical has included a revolutionary item for console shooters: a level editor. Up until now only PC pundits have had the ability to customize and build their very own Unreal and Quake levels, but that fact is no more. Console gamers too have the chance to design their personal levels of mayhem for the guys of TimeSplitters to duke it out in, via a respectively powerful editing tool. Starting off with a simple grid, players can add pre-built blocks of hallways and floors, add items and weapons and even the coloring of room lighting plus how fast it flickers. The easy interface is designed like you're building strait off a Lego set, attaching and detracting large passageways and rooms though a simple point-and-click process. While the editing tool isn't so strong that id Software and Epic will soon be knocking on our collective doors, it's a wonderful alternative to aspiring mappers who want their own level creations but don't have the time to learn UnrealEd or World craft, the two most popular level mod programs for the PC.

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