It clearly has a way to go yet – and it’s been in development for over five years. TimeSplitters Rewind doggedly continues to release sporadic updates, including one in March that demonstrated 15 minutes of gameplay. From Koch Media, at least, which has remained tight-lipped.
Timesplitters rewind series#
“The original games gave fans a massive content offer and provided a pure and genuinely fun arcade shooter experience. We have many fans of the TimeSplitters series among our own staff who are passionate about creating a product that will thrill today's gaming audience.” “We are hugely excited to have acquired TimeSplitters,” beamed Klemens Kundratitz, the CEO of Koch Media. It heavily implied that Deep Silver would be at the forefront of a potential release in the future needless to say, this put TimeSplitters Rewind’s team on the back foot. In August 2018, Koch Media announced its acquisition of the rights to TimeSplitters and Second Sight. Nothing sets off alarm bells for TimeSplitters 2 fans like myself quite like seeing it incorporated into a once-promising Homefront IP that was ultimately butchered into a questionable, open-world mess – one so average that it barely scraped 50% approval.įinally, there was some good news.
On the other, it placed it in a reimagining of the Homefront universe, which gutted the great story ideas of the original and turned it into a confusing mess. On one hand, it showed pride in the TimeSplitters franchise. This was exciting and disheartening in equal measure. Then, a flash of happiness in an otherwise dull decade for TimeSplitters fans: in 2016, Homefront: The Revolution teased TimeSplitters fans with two full, playable levels of TS2 (Siberia and Chicago) within an arcade cabinet in its Korean-occupied American setting. Remaining Crytek staff moved to Dambuster Studios, a new subsidiary of Koch’s publishing wing Deep Silver. In 2014, Crytek UK reportedly starting missing wage payments and bonuses, before eventually announcing that it was restructuring and selling its Homefront franchise – alongside the partially developed Homefront: The Revolution – to German media giant Koch Media. Development was slow, updates were infrequent, but it was never abandoned. Anyway, as so often happens in these dark situations, a fan-led project – TimeSplitters Rewind – was established to redevelop the franchise as a whole, using the CryEngine. Hopes for a Crytek-led sequel were dashed in 2012 when its CEO Cevat Yerli told CVG: “f we made a sequel to TimeSplitters, nobody would accept this apart from some fans, and we don't know how big the fan community is, unfortunately.”
Timesplitters rewind free#
This was followed by an alleged spat between LucasArts and Free Radical over Star Wars: Battlefront III, which was all but complete by the time the two’s fraught relationship led to the game’s outright cancellation.Īnything created for TimeSplitters 4 disappeared into the Crytek ecosystem in 2009, when the German company rebranded the remains of Free Radical as Crytek UK, which went on to develop Crysis 2 and 3. Sony / Free Radical Designįirstly, Haze – the company’s ambitious PS3-exclusive title released just two months after the console’s launch in Europe – failed to live up to huge expectations, showcasing an incredible idea executed in an uncharacteristically poor manner.
Haze was released early in the PS3's life cycle, to mediocre reviews. From its inception, its mechanics were tight, its graphics were excellent, and it carved a real niche in an otherwise rapidly diluting FPS market. TimeSplitters’ storyline was simple but madcap, using carefully considered and widely diverse characters from across different time periods to drive an ultimately hilarious narrative – essentially Quantum Leap, if Sam Beckett was battling evil aliens. Indeed, I’d go on record and say that it’s the greatest game not to receive a remaster, and we deserve one after 17 years of waiting.įor the uninitiated, the TimeSplitters franchise was a first-person shooter series developed by Free Radical Design, which was staffed by ex-Rare employees behind GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, specifically Graeme Norgate, arguably the greatest VGM composer of his generation. But so long as a modern, official re-release of TimeSplitters 2 isn’t delivered, or even just rumored to be in development, this trend for bringing back older titles will never reach its true potential.
0 kommentar(er)
