Failings of an FPS

I have recently come into acquisition of a Playstation 3 (legitimately), and decided I would like to test out its graphics capabilities. Enter Timeshift (I have to say I wasn’t really interested in hiring this game out, but Devil May Cry 4 was out, as was pretty much anything else that looked remotely interesting).

I’m the first to admit that first person shooters are not my favourite style of game, and although there are a few titles (Team Fortress 2, Halo) that I quite enjoy, I generally don’t spend more than a couple of hours (total) playing any FPS. For Timeshift, it barely made the half-hour mark. Admittedly this wasn’t solely based on the content of the game, although without other time constraints, I doubt I would have played for too much longer.

In terms of general game design and game play, Timeshift is just another FPS. The game’s sole innovation is the player’s ability to control time to a certain degree (pause, slow down, reverse). This is a cool feature, but is not enough to make the entire game innovative. Unfortunately, it just appears that there are limited areas (at least in the FPS genre) that developers are trying to innovate.

I should point out at this point that I’m not attempting to be specifically negative on Timeshift – I haven’t played it enough to comment on the general quality of the game. However, it is by no means an innovative game; it appeals to the same target audience as a thousand other FPSs, and ensures acceptance by sticking resolutely to well accepted game mechanics. Even the player’s introduction to the game follows a common model: the player is introduced to the game as a prototypical soldier or other such role, imbued with special fighting abilities through the aid of a high-tech suit (à la Half Life 2 / Halo). In keeping with this model, there is an attack on the ‘safe’ start location of the game, causing the player to be thrown into the game with an ‘malfunctioning’ suit, allowing abilities to be explained and uncovered through the early training stages of the game as the suit is repaired.I’m sure the game itself is quite fun, and the time-travel mechanic is definitely cool, but its game-play is mechanically identical to hundreds of other FPSs. And now, reaching the end of this post, I realise I’m probably being overly negative given that I have no suggestions for innovation of my own. Such is life.