Tweet
You know what first-person shooters need? Monkeys. We had them, once upon a time, but the cruel tide of fate snatched them from our fingers and replaced them with stoic blood-stained warriors, all knotted jaws and angry scowls.It's 2002, and the world is going gaga over this new game from Microsoft - Microsoft! - for something called the Xbox. It's Halo, and it will go on to be widely credited with entrenching the first-person shooter as the genre of choice for console blockbusters. Out go colourful platforming mascots, in come assault rifles and sticky grenades. And, fair play to Bungie, what Master Chief brought to the table was pretty spectacular. It just wasn't a patch on the real best shooter of the era. That, of course, would be TimeSplitters 2.
Like the first game in this sadly short-lived series, TimeSplitters 2 was the work of Free Radical, the Midlands-based studio founded by many of the team members who worked on Rare's seminal GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, the previous benchmarks for console shooter excellence. Timesplitters picked up their baton with aplomb, mixing smart objective-based gameplay with compelling interactive environments, and sprinkling inventive weaponry and no small amount of humour on top.
Read more…
More...