Monday, November 21, 2011

Special Monday Edition From the Archives: TimeSplitters Future Perfect (2005)

Every Friday (or Monday, in this case) we celebrate the heritage of Code Redd Net by posting a retro-review from our considerable back catalogue of embarrassingly naive, but nonetheless entertaining and heartfelt, movie and game reviews. Please pardon the prose; most of these articles were written in our immediately post-pubescent years. Hopefully you find them as enjoyable as we do.

The following review is from ChickenMan, and for whatever
reason I never did an actual review for Future Perfect. I consider this very strange indeed because it's one of my all-time favs, and I long ago mastered it, and the other 'Splitters as well, for that matter. A few days ago I made a custom map or two using the MapMaker feature and it amazes me that this game is still relevant to me, even though I completed it 100% roughly six years ago and I can never find any pals around town to play a few rounds of multiplayer. Of course, this all goes back to what I was talking about in regards to Creative Control; rather than giving us tedious busy work to do if we have a desire to be one of ChickenMan's Cursed Completionists, Future Perfect lets you make your own single- and multiplayer stages, and its replay value is therefore nearly infinite. And that's a quality game, kids. Not to mention the rest of the game is certainly one of the best shooters on PS2 or any other console (in my mind, it's only competition is from the other two games in the TimeSplitters series). My own review should be up within the week, but until then, enjoy ChickenMan's original critique:


"Don't let the name fool you. This game is better than it sounds. It still carries the classic TS feel and blazing speed. But this new one claims to have what TS2 didn't: 1) A good story (personally, I really didn't care) and 2) online capabilities. People wanted the latter so much that they tried connecting their PS2's to their computer with some other complicated procedures and actually did get online! But I ask myself, "What's the point of doing that if it's a definite probability that no one else is on?" The gameplay in TS: FP is very similar to the preludes except for a few things. There is a melee attack, which is pretty cool, but it takes the place of the alternate fire. Now to get to the alternate fire you press up on the D-Pad, which obviously takes longer, but that is one of the sacrifices you make. One of the changes, which I'm not so crazy about, is that they have reloading animations and if you change weapons without reloading you'll still have the same amount of ammunition. TS2 automatically had it reloaded when you came back to it. This makes the 2-barrel shotgun almost obsolete when taking on crews of zombies like ya'll did in the other two games with the same weapon. The grenades are now throwable instead of being an alternative fire, which benefits you because you can throw them when using any weapon. The vehicles in multiplayer are fun, yet I'm disappointed with them. I think the passenger should be able to do something. I also believe they should put the car with the mounted machine gun into mapmaker since they had it in the story mode, but not in arcade. The Story Mode itself is basically the same, which is good, except you're Cortez the whole time. If you've read our grills you'd know about a guy who didn't like changing characters, so lucky him. The Co-op is back with one change that I don't like. In the first two games only one player had to finish. In Future Perfect if one guy dies it's over. Of course there are the Arcade League and Challenge modes. But the big daddy is Online play. Up to eight players per match, you can play any mode on any map, including mapmaker, that you can offline, except Monkey Helper. One of my favorite things about online play is that you can take three of your buddies online with you, but you have to be on the same team in all team modes. I guess that's fair. It's bound to slow down and skip with some connections but it's fun. Be prepared to die, though. It happens quite a bit. The AI in Arcade will probably not prepare you adequately for the intensity of online opposition. But no amount of skill will keep you from failing online. It gets frustrating but it's TimeSplitters online. Overall, I prefer TimeSplitters 2 for offline play. But you should probably get TS: FP anyway, online or not."


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