Retro spotlight: TimeSplitters 2

Here's to 20 years of time traveling and also dual-wielding shotguns

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

As someone who believes Perfect Dark is one of the most important first-person shooters and multiplayer experiences in video games, it should come as no surprise that I’m also a big fan of TimeSplitters 2. All of the TimeSplitters games, really, but the first sequel hit that sweet spot of arriving when local and LAN multiplayer gaming was still significant, and it expanded on the story mode of the original in ways that better reflected its Perfect Dark and Rareware roots. A perfect balance of the concept, at the perfect time.

You see, TimeSplitters 2 was developed by Free Radical Design, a British studio founded in 1999. Started primarily by former Rare developers like David Doak and composer Graeme Norgate, it left quite the impression despite existing for about a decade. TimeSplitters was their first game, released in 2000 for the Playstation 2 about half-a-year after Perfect Dark came out for the Nintendo 64 — the former Rare devs who made up Free Radical Design’s roster had left to form their own studio well before Perfect Dark had wrapped development. TimeSplitters focused heavily on its multiplayer mode — single-player was there, but it was shallow in comparison to both Perfect Dark and even 1997’s Goldeneye 007, as you had just the one thing to do in each mission in order to complete it.

For TimeSplitters 2, however, something approaching the depth of Perfect Dark’s mission structure arrived. Now the goal wasn’t simply to find the hidden Time Crystal in different time periods and then exit stage left, but instead, you had to go around playing as these different era-appropriate characters while completing a number of objectives: you’re (almost) always collecting a Time Crystal and escaping the level through a portal to another time period, but before you get to that point, you might also have to turn power back on, find and destroy sensitive documents… there’s a lot more to do.

Image credit: Polygon

On Easy, there are fewer objectives required to complete a level, with more introduced on normal difficulty. Then, on hard, the optional secondary objectives are often mandatory, which can make each stage a much longer experience since you have more shooting, more exploring, more problem solving. Here’s what the game’s first stage, 1990 Siberia, looks like on normal:

• Deactivate the Communications Dish

• Investigate the secret digging site

• Restore Power

• Retrieve the Time Crystal

• Destroy the bio-hazard container at the digging site

• Access the top of the dam

• Eliminate the gunship

• Escape through the time portal

• Burn all evidence in the filing cabinets (Optional)

• Don't allow any mutants to survive (Optional)

That’s eight required objectives and a pair of optional ones. On easy, there are five required, one optional. On hard, those optional are now required, plus you have to deal with fewer shields lying around as well as far more enemies to dispatch or avoid, depending. That’s just a tad more depth than the original’s “collect Time Crystal, exit stage.”

Whereas Perfect Dark emphasized futuristic weaponry and sci-fi-era Bondsian gadgetry, TimeSplitters 2 is all over the map: you are, after all, traveling through time. In that Siberia level set in 1990, the protagonist Sergeant Cortez morphs appearance into that of a Soviet guard, and a woman at that. That’s just how the game goes: you’re always playing as Cortez, but it’s Cortez in another form, be it Soviet soldier or wild west gunman or robot or Chicago detective or 19th century French jester. The appeal of the time travel isn’t just so that the locations can all look wildly different, but also so that the weaponry is varied: you might have the same kinds of weaponry, in terms of, say, this is your pistol, this is your rifle, etc., but the Soviet guard is going to be equipped differently than your French character from 100 years earlier.

Which in turn makes the arcade mode — multiplayer — a wild ride, since you can pair rocket launchers with sci-fi guns with Thompson submachine guns (aka Tommy Guns) while also doing the inexplicable dual-wielding these developers were known for, be it at Rare or Free Radical Design. Want to dual-wield shotguns you might have to aim at a monkey carrying a bazooka? TimeSplitters 2 is for you.

If you enjoyed Perfect Dark’s multiplayer, then you will also be into (or already are into) that of TimeSplitters 2. It has much of the same kind of customization — picking which weapons are available, what kind of enemies you’ll be facing, plenty of bots, four-player splitscreen — while also featuring plenty of ways to play, whether it be playing to a specific score, in teams, everyone for themselves. And there are the various game modes, too, in addition to the standard deathmatch modes, 16 in all.

Here goes: Capture the Bag (Capture the Flag), Bag Tag (where you have to survive holding onto the bag for as long as possible while everyone else hunts you), Elimination (a deathmatch mode with limited lives that serves as last player standing), Shrink (players who are lower in the rankings shrink in size, making them tougher to hit), Flame Tag (avoid the person on fire or else you’ll catch fire; whoever is on fire for the least amount of time wins), Virus (like fire, but the flames don’t cause damage; the goal is to be the last one untouched), Vampire (you must kill to keep a “Bloodlust” meter full, and will die of it empties), Leech (cause damage to refill your health bar), Regeneration (deathmatch, but with health slowly refilling), Thief (you have to collect coins upon a player’s death, which means it’s both firefight and race), Gladiator (only the current Gladiator earns points for kills, but if you kill them, you become the Gladiator), Zones (capture the area), Assault (objectives-based; one team attempts to complete them, the other to stop them from being completed), and Monkey Assistant (whichever player is in last has a small army of monkeys to help them attack whoever is in first place).

Now, not all of these modes are available from the start: you’ll have to unlock them by completing more and more of the game’s campaign first. It’s worth the effort, though, because the story mode is fun, even it it lacks the actual narrative stuff that Perfect Dark did and is much more “and now you’re here in this mission” about things, and the reward for completing it is, well, all of the madness in the preceding paragraph. In addition to the story and arcade modes, there’s also the challenge mode — and yes, Perfect Dark had one, too. TimeSplitters 2 wasn’t exactly thriving due to its originality, but instead, became one of the highest-rated and beloved first-person shooters of its generation because of how highly refined all of it was. It was on more powerful hardware than Perfect Dark, arrived early on in the lives of the Playstation 2, Xbox, and GameCube instead of as its home system was making the switch from current-gen to last-gen, and benefited from releasing when console-based FPS games were both more accepted and played more smoothly thanks to the trails blazed by games like Goldeneye 007, but also 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. And, of course, being actually dual analog helped for how it all felt to play.

It’s a little thing, but it’s meaningful, and shows the difference between what Perfect Dark was capable of and what TimeSplitters 2 managed. When you die in multiplayer in Perfect Dark, there’s a death sequence with its own little musical cue, as well as a few seconds you have to wait while that plays and your next life loads up. It’s not obtrusive or forever-taking, but it is there. In TimeSplitters 2, you die, and if you press a button afterward, you respawn immediately somewhere else in the level, and, if you have the option set, already armed, too. It never stops: you run, and shoot, and run some more, and whether you go down in a blaze of glory or regret, you’re right back in the fight a fraction of a second later if you want to be, to run, shoot, and run some more.

TimeSplitters 2 somewhat vanished from existence for a bit there, which was even more of a problem when Free Radical Design itself disappeared — after a couple of failures in a row, one a critical and sales issue (Haze) and the other a canceled Star Wars: Battlefront game with EA that was supposedly 99 percent complete, Free Radical Design went into financial administration and was acquired by Crytek. A second studio change later, Free Radical Design is now back as of 2021, with the original founders in place once again. In between all of that, though, were plans for a TimeSplitters 4 that never emerged outside of concept art that featured things like a nun wearing bandoleers while dual-wielding, and plans for an HD version of TimeSplitters 2 that would seemingly never surface because no publisher wanted to bother with it.

Much has changed since those days of TimeSplitters-related hopelessness. The two TimeSplitters sequels are backwards-compatible on the Xbox One and Series X systems, and available both for purchase and download on those to as well as the digital-only Series S model. That’s a significant jump forward from having to buy and play Homefront: The Revolution and then inputting a cheat code to unlock all of TimeSplitters 2 in 4K in order to get there. You’re still out of luck if you have a Playstation 4 or 5, and reduced to buying Homefront: The Revolution in order to play TimeSplitters 2 if you have a PC, but still. The games being on modern Xbox consoles instead of on no consoles is a huge leap forward, and it comes at a time when the studio that developed them in the first place exists once more.

Will we eventually get a TimeSplitters 4? That seems to be the idea, this time published by Deep Silver since Free Radical Design is under that umbrella which is itself under a larger umbrella. But hey, even if it doesn’t come to pass, or it ends up not being worth the wait, at least we’re back to being in a universe where the TimeSplitters games we loved so much are once again available for purchase. That’s not nothing, considering I have an entire column dedicated to good games that should be available once again — not all that long ago, TimeSplitters 2, which still feels so good to play 20 years after its release, would have been one such game.

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