As promised yesterday, I’ll be shedding some light on some eye-catching features of Timesplitters: Future Perfect. I’ll begin with the use of … blooooooood, as there is a story attached to how-it-came-to-be.

Where at first it might strike you as odd, that a humorous game with a cartoonesk style has such a lot of blood in it… it’s not. Yes, it is that easy ! Rest assured, Future Perfect is not a gore-infested game, but expect blood when you shoot someone.

And it’s quite a funny story why the Free Radical Design boys took the time and effort to incorporate blood. It’s all the result of the British Commission that gives videogames an age-rating (I’m not sure if it was the PEGI ). That commission gave Timesplitters: Future Perfect a ‘Mature’ rating. Needless to say, the Free Radical Designers were quite shocked because, at that time, there was next to no blood or gore in the game. But…. they had to present the game just a couple of days after the famous Manhunt-fuss in Great-Britain. The result: a ‘Mature’ rating. So the developers thought: “hell, we already got a mature rating anyway – we might just make the best of it and use blood’. It worked !

Why did it work? Or better yet, why does the whole game ‘feel good’ ? Because of the ample use of humor! There is hardly a scene in the game where the developers did not put some tongue-in-cheek elements in. The jokes are all around you – you just have to open your eyes to see them… or not to trip over them. From mere ‘situation-humor’, over mild irony to pure slapstick comedy – it’s all in there.

Some of that humor is provided by the vast amount of unlockable characters in Timesplitters: Future Perfect. Fans of the Timesplitters series will welcome back the monkeys Free Radical Design is famous for. Crazy apes that either love you… or love to hate and attack you. Always good for a laugh! The extra games as well are good for a lot of laughs and a lot of gameplay-pleasure. I especially enjoyed the monkey-shout-out, where hordes of zombie monkeys attack and you need to shoot them down rapidly, without running out of ammo. Good fun.


Now, I haven’t said a lot about the Multiplayer element of Timesplitters: Future Perfect yet. I got a good reason for this: I don’t need to say a lot about it. It all comes down to this: it’s fun. Plain and simple: pure fun. The controls are still as intuitive and easy-to-learn, the gameplay is sublime – it reminded me of a tongue-in-cheeck version and mix of Quake II, Unreal Tournament, Halo 2 and a couple of other high-quality games. There is no doubt about it: Timesplitters: Future Perfect will probably be one of the best online multiplayer games available. ‘nuff said.

What I must not fail to mention is the ‘mapmaker’ option, where you can easily design and construct your very own multiplayer map. Up to seven floors high, with or without a roof, with ramps and/or staircases, spawnpoints where you put them, vehicles plenty and manable gunturrets. Very cool!


All in all, we were impressed. Thoroughly impressed. The game was nearly finished, with a couple of months left for polishing some graphics and clearing out the last bugs. I can safely say that I would recommend this game to anyone who loves to game and especially for those who love humor in their games. I’d even go some further: this is the ideal game to convice gamers that console-shooters can be great fun! Especially online.
We were all quite impressed with the quality of the graphics, humor and game-play. Be asssured: all the journalists who where present rated Timesplitters: Future Perfect amongst the top-3 console shooters they ever saw/played.