TimeShift: The One That Actually Shifted Through Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS81guQwhXI

Originally slated for release from Atari in early 2006, publishing rights to Saber Interactive’s TimeShift switched to Sierra in April of that year and was delayed multiple times. By the time the game was released in late 2007, Sierra had been bought by Vivendi and the shooter fans that had been eagerly anticipating TimeShift a year earlier had all but forgotten it existed, which is for the best, as the game was completely overhauled following the poor reception of its 2006 demo. Saber announced the overhaul in April of 2007, yet somehow the game still managed to come out a few months later. Weird.

As if the name didn’t make it clear, TimeShift’s big gimmick is the ability to slow, stop, and rewind time. You achieve this with a special suit, because as Crysis taught us, special suits are cool. Also cool is the idea of tossing a time grenade into a group of enemies and then firing bullets into the bubble that hangs in the air until the time-stopping effect fades. So yes, the idea was cool. In practice, the whole game was just kind of okay. The best thing to come of TimeShift was this spooky trailer for a much more exciting game: