Reviews
TimeShift (2007)
an underrated game!
Imagine yourself positioned on the first floor of a highly devastated building. Your trapped and you need to get out of there because in a couple of seconds this place will be blown to dust. So you take a grenade and blow a whole in the floor and you jump through it. But now the place starts falling apart because of the damage you created! So you start rewinding time until the whole vanishes and the floor is back to its safe state. Now you see a door in front of you, and the shotgun you have equipped is not strong enough to brake it. So you stop time, and shoot the door 5 times in a row. When you let time continue, the power of all those bullets you fired accumulates and the door gets shattered. Finally you get out of the building, into the open, but you have only a couple of seconds left before the building explodes. So you slow down the time to get to a safe position. And so the impossible occurred, you watch the building getting destroyed while you were just in there a couple of seconds ago!
I think this little example demonstrates what Timeshift wanted to do. However the game actually focuses more on the use of time powers in shootouts, and not that much in the environment. You will not encounter a situation like described above in Timeshift. And that's just a shame, because some more original use of the time powers could have made Timeshift an instant classic. Now it just stays "a good game with time powers".
Still, this game is very good and deserves your attention. The atmosphere and graphics are excellent: indoor environments in a post apocalyptic scene, outdoor in the snow, in a big factory where the army gets assembled, or a dropship or... Especially the beautiful shadows in some levels are remarkable. The sound effects are also great and they get altered when for example time slows down.
Like i said the only minor thing about Timeshift is a lack of good situations where you need your time powers both to kill your enemies and to manipulate your environment at the same time. Now the game serves us good shooting gameplay and occasionally a more or less original "time" puzzle.
I hope a sequel will come, because this game has still a lot more potential to be discovered. Until then, if you enjoyed the Timeshift demo, or you want a more original shooter, go out and try this game!
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007)
Good game, but not that good
Recently uncharted got the platinium label, so that was the perfect reason for me to buy it, after all the game had gotten great reviews.
Like anyone else the first thing I noticed were the awesome graphics and animations. Everything is just made with so much detail and care, if you want to show off what your ps3 can do, this is the game.
However there's also a downside. The game can roughly be seen as a combination of 3 different gameplay elements:
First off we have the shootouts. Nathan can search for cover, peek out and shoot his enemies. Yes as other reviewers mention it, you could compare this to Gears of War. However Gears did it like 10 times better. Aiming goes slow (even on full sensitivity) and doesn't get rewarded: you end up shooting a guy 15 times in his chest before he goes down. Meanwhile, other enemies try to flank you and throw grenades to force you to keep moving, exposing you to there fire: the game gets difficult because of a lack of good control and moves, for example:
Nathan can't throw back a grenade; he can get hit even when he's firing blind from cover (which doesn't make sense); He can't run around the corner of a low object from cover without standing and thus getting shot, before getting in to cover again; You have to change your camera standpoint by clicking the joystick before you can see an enemy who is already shooting at you
The second one is the acrobatic platform action as we could call it, like Prince of Persia. The problem here is that it is just way to easy. The path that the player needs to follow is just so clear. Most of the time Nathan won't even jump on other platforms which you thought that could be useful. It's hard to do something wrong, you don't have to think so no challenge and fun. This is no Tomb Raider people.
The third gameplay element are the puzzles. Here Nathan takes his notebook from Drake and shows a page with useful information. Again the same problem as above, way to easy. Sometimes there not even worth to be called a puzzle.
Story wise the game is nothing special but also not that bad. Things start slow but eventually it becomes more interesting.
Don't get me wrong, Uncharted is good and should be worth you attention, but it's simply not that good. It's unbalanced in it's different gameplay elements, it's frustrating and easy when it shouldn't be. I give it a 7.