|
Coming from someone whose sum experience with the TimeSplitters series was watching a fat British guy in Shaun of the Dead play the second game, there was a lot of room for surprises and Future Perfect never disappointed. While its admirable that games like Painkiller and Serious Sam are being advertised as back to basics affairs and anti-modern, and that counterbalance is always healthy (I guess even necessary), Future Perfect never introduces its classicisms while sacrificing actual good game design. Hell, Cortez, the main character, can't even jump, which is a bit jarring at first though it really frees the game up and keeps it a refreshingly fast clip. Yet, despite its old school theologies, the game doesn't remind me of any FPS from back in the day that had to be loaded from five inch floppy disks and where blood and gore were represented by plate-sized pixels. It is its own chimera, mysteriously fallen from a time warp and into the lap of modern technology.
Another pleasant surprise: the story and plot. Cortez, at first, acts and looks like just about every brain dead macho moron that blows a hole from the title screen to the credit roll, and as an interesting character who could carry a game on his own, he was about as convincing as Vin Diesel in a family comedy about kids and changing diapers. And once the developers started to introduce time loops and wormholes where future, past and present Cortezes had to collaborate with each other to overcome obstacles, it was a real groan inducer thinking I had to endure more than one of these jokers. But after a few levels, one realizes that is the joke, of course (not a particularly uncommon joke, but rarely executed with such panache and zing as it is here). Cortez's quips aren't really that funny to the player, or to his allies, in any time period and any situation, but he's like those jerks you see everywhere who's happy when he makes himself laugh (Oh so literally and existentially in this game!), the rest of the world be damned, and eventually his tactless grace and determination wins you over.
The story starts out simply with Cortez trying to retrieve Time Crystals to preventing the war from ever happening and then quickly spirals way out of control. Time travel may be overdone in movies, but never has it reached such giddy fantastic heights in videogames as it does here: time paradoxes, robots, mad scientists, zombies, characters meeting each other; it has everything. Only the Back to the Future series has explored time travel with such moxie and humour, but while with Future Perfect the whole payoff is in one game, it was spread across two movies, and the second movie led into a crappy western with Mary Steenburgen.
After the slower lumbering games of Halo 2, multiplayer in Future Perfect is refreshingly fast, and makes you sad that you forgot about the days of no waiting for respwans. But still, Halo 2 has me spoiled, and the games aren't as customizable as they should be, most noticeable is that there's no option to create a mode from scratch. The AI, even at max intelligence, never use the sniper guns unless forced to and even then they're not efficient. Fortunately, they can be very good at using the Mag-Charger, an absolutely brilliant weapon whose secondary fire puts the player's screen into a heat-scanning mode that can shoot through walls. The perfect anti-sniper gun, simply crouch in a secluded corner and pick off those pesky folk that stand around up in those towers and canyon ridges.
Even though the single player mission lasts only about ten hours, there are plenty of challenges and league matches to plow through, which unlock new weapons, cheats, and characters (over 150 in all, each with their own stats if you choose to play multiplayer with them on). And the mapmaker is the most impressive I've ever seen on a console, user-friendly yet full of potential, it even rivals some of the lower and middle-end mapmakers out on PC. Future Perfect is simply fantastic, where around each corner is a rousing surprise, and the story is successful where several others have failed. It is fortified with enough game modes so that it is fully prepared to endure the test of time.
|
