Buy a World War II game, and you might storm Omaha Beach in 1944 or fend off the 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks. Buy an out-of-this-world first-person shooter, and you'll blast scores of aliens while saving the world as we might come to know it in, say, 2534. But either way, you'll be parked firmly in a single era. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect mixes up that standard by mimicking Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. The game's hero is thrust through time early and often, so even when one level goes stale (space, for instance), a new place is right around the corner (1924 Scotland, for example). The changing environments help spike interest in continued firefighting: It's enticing to see how the game will represent a given time period, and to see what weapons were available to the Charlton Heston-types of any given era. It's pleasantly jarring to expect huge sci-fi blasters in the pre-WWII era, only to be handed a Luger.
The fringe benefits to time travel don't end there: In one of the game's coolest touches, TimeSplitters occasionally whisks players back to a previous level, allowing them to fight alongside… themselves. Ahh, the magic of time machines.
Time periods aside, Future Perfect's script offers some actual humor. Games generally just aren't funny, and when they try to be, they usually get little more than a sigh and an eye-roll. But this game is actually a laugh. The script sometimes suffers from poor voice-acting, but from slapstick to subtle jabs to absolute goofball humor, it earns more than a few chuckles.
As first-person shooters go, TimeSplitters is lightning-fast, with few dull moments. Players won't be skulking around; this is a run-and-gun experience. Single-player is a comparative snoozer when compared to the multiplayer game (16 players online, or four-player split-screen offline), but the mini-games offer plenty to do—like scalping monkeys with a shotgun.
Beyond the game: If you think you can do better, there's a map-maker built in, so you can build your own levels—and realize how difficult level design can be.
Worth playing for: The best gaming laugh since Dennis Hopper's performance in GTA: Vice City, the cinematic in 1924 Scotland features a simple, wonderful sight gag: a pipe being shot out of a man's mouth.
Frustration sets in when: There are a handful of genuine guffaws, but shooting futuristic space monkeys wears thin in a hurry.
Final judgment: Halo 2 can have the future, and Brothers In Arms can have the past, but TimeSplitters: Future Perfect makes a virtue of not choosing. Time is on its side.