First Person Shooters have never really been my favorite genre of game. Yet some of the fondest gaming memories I have are of playing the couple of FPS games that I have played extensively. The first two were Doom and Doom 2 which I spent a lot of time playing between 1994 and 1998. Not so much for the single player story mode but for the death match play which was pretty novel at the time. The next FPS style games I played significantly were TimeSplitters. At the time, it seemed like these were forever after Doom 2 but it really wasn’t THAT long. TimeSplitters was released in 2000 and TimeSplitters 2 was released in 2002.
Like Doom and Doom 2, I liked TimeSplitters and TimeSplitters 2 mostly for their player v. player modes. In particular, in addition to straight up death match style play there was (among others) a mode called flame tag. Basically, one person would be running around the map on fire. For as long as you were on fire, your life would decrease. That would happen until you died or until you tagged someone and passed the fire on to someone else. I had an absolute blast playing that mode.
To back up a little, TimeSplitters 2 was the sequel (obviously) to the original TimeSplitters. The original was exclusive to the PlayStation 2 and was in fact a launch release. TimeSplitters 2, in addition to the PlayStation 2, was also released on the Xbox and GameCube. Most of my experience with this one came on the GameCube version.
The storyline basically revolves around recovering time crystals from a race of space mutants called TimeSplitters who are, for some reason, trying to destroy mankind. In order to do this, you’ll travel through various time periods and use various weapons appropriate to those time periods. Each level takes place in a different time periods and typically has several primary and secondary objectives. There’s nothing wrong with the storyline, but as previously mentioned, it was the player v. player aspects of these types of games I generally enjoyed the most. I’ve never completed this game, or Doom or Doom 2 for that matter, despite playing them for many hours.
In some respects, if you’ve played one FPS, you’ve played them all. TimeSplitters 2 is nice for the variety it provides. The fact that it takes place across different time periods makes for an easy way to accomplish this. Likewise, many of the weapons of time periods specific versions. Though I mentioned flametag and straight up deathmatch there are additional modes of play including cooperative. Typically, you can play with up to four players split screen but with a system link you could have as many as 16 players. Unfortunately this was not available on the GameCube version so four players was the best you could do. Though certainly not always true with sequels, TimeSplitters 2 was an improvement on the original in almost every way.
Though I am not an FPS connoisseur, if you are a fan of FPS games (and even if you are not) I highly recommend TimeSplitters 2 (and its predecessor). I mostly played the GameCube version but also played either the PS2 or Xbox version (I forget which) and there isn’t really a huge difference (unless you want to link systems for more than four players). There was one more game in the series called TimeSplitters: Future Perfect but I have not played that one. Other games in the series were considered but never made it out of early development phases. I have a fondness for the GameCube version since that’s mostly what I played but any are fine. The Xbox version has the added bonus that you can play it on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Or, if you want to play a 4K version, there are codes to unlock the full version of TimeSplitters 2 from within Homefront: The Revolution.
Screen shots above are from the GameCube version of the game.
