TimeSplitters 2

aka: TimeSplitter: Jikuu no Shinryakusha
Moby ID: 7574
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Description official descriptions

TimeSplitters 2, the sequel to Free Radical Design's PlayStation 2 launch title, once again sends players hurtling through time, as they battle the malevolent TimeSplitters in ten unique time periods, from the Wild West to a futuristic space station, and everything in between.

The game's story finds Cortez, the series' hero, on a quest to discover the origins of the TimeSplitters, an enigmatic group that travels through time causing trouble for the good people of Earth. Using the paradoxes of time travel to his advantage, the hero can regularly join up with past and future versions of himself, to fight the enemy as a team. A wide selection of historical, modern, and futuristic weapons is available, and environments feature destructible elements.

Depending on the difficulty level chosen, players will find themselves with rudimentary objectives to complete or, on the harder settings, new areas and substantially more involved objectives to fulfill. Two players can also play the Story mode cooperatively and simultaneously.

Like its predecessor, TimeSplitters 2 features a Challenge mode, which presents the player with a selection of time- and skill-based events. Completing these within the predetermined constraints awards the player with bronze, silver, or gold medals, which in turn aid in unlocking additional game options, levels, and playable characters (of which there are more than 120).

The Arcade mode offers League, Custom, and Network sub-modes. League events feature pre-configured maps, game types, and objectives for the player to compete in, while the other Arcade modes make up the bulk of the multiplayer portion of the title. In the Custom mode, up to four players and numerous AI "bots" can compete in 16 different customizable disciplines including Deathmatch, Regeneration, Virus, Thief, Shrink, Monkey Assistant, and Flame Tag -- each offering an altered form of gameplay. Thief, for example, tasks players with collecting tokens left behind by fallen combatants. Here, the tokens determine the winner, not the number of kills.

Spellings

  • タイムスプリッター ~時空の侵略者~ - Japanese spelling
  • 时空分裂者2 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

173 People (163 developers, 10 thanks) · View all

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 90 ratings with 9 reviews)

One of the greatest multiplayer games ever created

The Good
This game has lots apon lots of multiplayer options to use and they never get old. Everything about the mutliplaye is really fun. the single player game was o.k though

The Bad
This game does not support online gameplay for the Gamecube unfortionatly and the single player game or co-op mode is not the greatest and is very easy to beat.

The Bottom Line
This game is a must have for people who enjoy multiplayer games and playing games with other people. I don't recommend this game to hard-core solo players because the one player mode is no the greatest thing.

GameCube · by Kirk Carson (1) · 2003

My favorite game for PS2!!!

The Good
Just when I thought the 1st Timesplitters was my favorite game, along comes Timesplitters 2. More heavy guns and a lot of awesome arenas. The story mode in this game was awesome. I loved the plot it was awesome. There was a lot of intense moments and even a couple of brain scrambling puzzles. The multi-player was just as good as the last Timesplitters game in fact better.

The Bad
This game was so much fun the only thing I didn't like was the fact that once you dominate the story and deathmatch it can be be boring without some good competition. So make sure you get your friends involved and really crank up the competition.

The Bottom Line
The best FPS on PS2 guaranteed to delivery much fun.

PlayStation 2 · by DudeOfMonson (97) · 2007

One of the best games from my childhood (even though it traumatized me)

The Good
Because the story is about time travel the decides to go nuts with the concepts and introduce ten levels each with zero connectivity. You go from 1930's Chicago to 18th century France and then to space for example. I actually really like this because it offers a lot of variety which helps keeping the game interesting, plus it also adds to the humor and silliness of the game. If I do have to complaint, it would be that the sci-fi setting returns more often then I would like and they never come with different weapons like the other levels, but that it nitpicking.

The game has a lot of humor, but it's a really weird kind of humor that is very hard to explain. It's incredibly silly, often it parodies stuff and sometimes it's acting all serious just to weird you out. In the earlier mentioned France setting you have to take down a satanist who is holding out in the Notre Dame, the cut-scene starts and you see him yelling about angels and preparing a woman for sacrificing, when all of a sudden the player characters sneaks into the building wearing a brightly-colored clown suit. I would also explain why it's silly, but I think the Gingerbread cookies you can play as and those monkeys speak for themselves.

Let me clarify the "traumatized" part that I mentioned in the summary. When I first played this game I was ten or something and my dad got it for me because it looked like a really funny game without any realistic violence. At the time I wasn't really used to violent video games, I didn't care all that much about them, but I was also very easily scared. The fact that I was a bit of a wuss was really troublesome when navigating through dark dungeons with zombies and aliens on your tail. Now, roughly seven years later, I am shaking while playing this game, constantly fearing something will jump at me or suddenly spawn into the game. I have played some of the scariest games out there, I have watched some horrifying movies and I am a big fan of the H.P. Lovecraft books, but it is this game that finally has me sleeping with the lights on.

That was a bit of a personal story that I really wanted to share, but something everybody has to agree upon is that this game has a wonderful multi player. Not only is there a co-op mode that allows a second player to join in on the story mode, there is also four-player mode with dozens of game modes, maps, options to change as well as almost all the items and weapons in the entire game and a whole library full off characters to choose from after unlocking them. Every fight is a guaranteed chaos with a decent enough AI to back-up or fight against the real players.

The player can also customize which weapons he wants to spawn and save these to sets, he can do the same to the enemies that will join in and last but not least: there is a mode in which you can make your own map. This "make your own map" mode in insanely detailed and a million times better than the forge mode from Halo 3, you can place hundreds of items, spawn thousands of props and make every tiny bit count. It's very easy to make a very good map that allows for challenging and fair battles, which is great because they often make for the best maps to play Deathmatch in.

Turning up the difficulty in the story mode does not only make the enemies stronger, but it also adds more objective and options to all the missions. For example: In the Siberia map there is a big dam that my cousin and I were always admiring, trying to figure out why anybody would go through the trouble of making that dam if it was off-limits, see on the easy setting this dam has no purpose, you just destroy the files and satellites before going into the base and destroying the alien machinery. However, if you play it on normal difficulty you suddenly also need to restore power to the base which allows you to take the lift up to the dam and use the turrets there to fight off an enemy wave and an army helicopter.

The auto-aim is pretty nice and makes this game much for enjoyable for everyone. It reminded me about Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 which I liked a whole lot better than Turok because the controls were not really top-notch, so in Goldeneye you could rely on your auto-aim to shoot the enemies instead of taking a magazine to the chest before finally getting your gun to aim straight at the enemies (like in Turok). Here you just need to look at the enemies and the gun will do the rest, this also doesn't make the game too easy and it can still get very difficult when lots of enemies show-up with snipers and machine guns.

The Bad
The biggest problem in this game's story mode is a glitch that can be triggered very easily, at the end of most levels you will have to complete your final objective in order to make the exit appear, but that exit doesn't appear if you haven't completed all the main objectives yet. What also appears alongside the exit are constantly spawning enemies that do lots of damage and take quite a few bullets, so that means you will have to go back and try to complete the objective while those bastards are on your heels. It can also be very difficult to know you are missing something because sometimes a certain objective is in the same room as the boss, so you might assume the missing piece is there only to find out that it's not.

The game is graphically lacking, the animation is pretty nice and I liked the aesthetic, but when you look at the water it's just a still picture that never moves, you may also notice that sometimes there are problems with the cut-scenes (clothes that look like they are made of carton and characters floating a few milometers above the ground). One graphical problem that also troubles the gameplay is the blur you get when you turn around sometimes, it makes everything hard to see and can end with you making a 360 degrees turn when you intended to look at an enemy shooting in your back.

The maps aren't really linear, but they aren't really open either, it's somewhere in between which leaves fans of linear maps (like me) with uneasy feeling and not been sure in what direction to go first while fans of open maps will feel like they are trapped in a monkey cage, big and with a lot of paths to go, but ultimately still locked in and limited. It doesn't really please anybody and quite often the secondary objective are all placed on the easiest path anyway, so there is just no purpose to check the dozens of copy & pasted empty rooms.

One level takes the cake for annoying me and that is Neo-Tokyo, where you have to follow a hacker into her hide-out. This is the only mission where you are inspected to sneak and in multi-player it is practically impossible. It's also very easy to fail if you don't go through a certain door fast enough (it will close quickly after the hacker goes through) and on the higher difficulties there are police cars and more cameras to bother you. This is the only map the I dread to play every time I put this game in my Nintendo Wii.

The Bottom Line
Timesplitters 2 is possibly the best console FPS of it's generation and that is for a pretty damn good reason. It has no realism whatsoever, it's funny,it works pretty damn well and it has one of the best multi-player modes and customization options I have ever seen in a video game. Sure it's graphically a bit lacking and there is one level that takes the piss (as well as one glitch), but that is hardly a reason to avoid this game.

If you have any of the three consoles from the previous generation lying around or your current system is capable of running this game (backwards comparability), then I highly recommend this game to all fans of FPS games because this is truly a gem in the genre.

GameCube · by Asinine (957) · 2011

[ View all 9 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
PlayStation.com screens are for Future Perfect Infernos (44016) Jun 30, 2020

Trivia

1001 Video Games

TimeSplitters 2 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

References to the game

TimeSplitters 2 is the game being played by Ed, Shaun's best mate, in the "romzomcom" movie Shaun of the Dead.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2002 – #10 Best GameCube Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Jason Walker.

Xbox Series, Xbox One added by Eufemiano Bullanga.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, j.raido 【雷堂嬢太朗】, Mark Ennis, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added October 24, 2002. Last modified March 15, 2024.