TimeSplitters Rewind Revives The Wildest PlayStation 2 Shooter Trilogy As A Brand-New Game
Turning back the clock.
A decade is a long time in video games. It’s enough time for original ideas to become trends, wear out their welcome, disappear. Or enough time for a developer to have a messy first try and refine it into something great. Or, in one case, almost enough time for a huge mod of a game series that’s also been defunct for decades to get off the ground.
"Sorry it's taken us so long," the website for TimeSplitters Rewind’s release reads. "We've only been making the largest free content videogame ever."
After 13 years in development, TimeSplitters Rewind is finally out, collecting the TimeSplitters trilogy from the early 2000s into one remixed package. Rather than directly remaking any of the games in the series, TimeSplitters Rewind is “a greatest hits collection,” as development team Pantheonyx puts it, mashing the best parts of all three games together. At launch, that means it has an impressive 28 maps and 20 game modes to play with, and 96 characters to bring into them. It also includes the entire campaign mode of the original TimeSplitters, which is all playable in singleplayer or co-op.
TimeSplitters Rewind revives a unique PS2 shooter series in a new form.
And that’s evidently just the start. Pantheonyx considers TimeSplitters Rewind’s release an early access game, and it’s planning more maps, characters, and modes for the future, in case the dozens of each available already aren’t quite enough. Both the current release and Pantheonyx’s future plans also include entirely new game modes developed just for TimeSplitter Rewind.
If you haven’t played any of the TimeSplitters games, those numbers might sound absolutely ridiculous. But that overwhelming amount of content is a big part of what brought players to the series in the first place. Released on PlayStation 2 between 2000 and 2005 (with the latter two games also coming to Xbox and GameCube), the TimeSplitters games are arcade shooters that embraced a sort of goofy maximalism in every part of their design. Each game is overflowing with ridiculous characters (from monkeys to clowns to snowmen) and game modes that have you smashing the environment with bricks, racing to collect bananas, and playing tag while on fire. They’re hectic, deeply strange games that feel like nothing else in the first-person shooter genre today.
That all makes TimeSplitters the perfect series for a revival from dedicated fans. Rumors of sequels and official remakes have swirled for years, but at this point, it’s hard to imagine a TimeSplitters game that kept any of the originals’ personality actually being released by a major publisher today. While the original TimeSplitters games are still playable, a new iteration seems entirely out of the question, and checking in on the official versions still available makes it clear just how different they are from what players want from first-person shooters today. They’re essentially party games, the shooter equivalent of Mario Party, for when you want something fun and chaotic to play without taking it too seriously.
TimeSplitters’ appeal lies in the wild variety of its characters and game modes.
I spent many an afternoon playing TimeSplitters 2 with friends when the PlayStation 2 was still a going concern, and clearly there are enough long-time fans out there to make bringing it back worthwhile. TimeSplitters Rewind is also the rare fan project to actually get the go-ahead from the game’s actual owner. Crytek, which purchased original developer Free Radical, officially allowed Pantheonyx to create the mod way back in 2013, even providing the team with the games’ original assets, though they didn’t end up being used in the final project.
For players used to grinding Call of Duty and Battlefield, TimeSplitters Rewind might just be a bewildering breath of fresh air. It feels nothing like the shooters that players are most familiar with today, and as odd as that makes it, it could also be a blessing. Without battle passes to earn and near-pro players cleaning up in casual lobbies, TimeSplitters Rewind is a rare chance at a more casual kind of shooter, one where the sheer ridiculousness of what’s on offer is enough to make it worth going back for another round.
