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.