Peak of the TimeSplitters series, Free Radical humorous FPS with time travel. Delirious story, exceptional multiplayer, huge armory. One of the most fun FPS games of the Xbox generation. Excellent value, often underrated.
Sergeant Cortez travels through history from 1914 to 2401 to retrieve stolen temporal artifacts, accompanied by colorful characters across varied and dynamic levels. Published by Eidos Interactive, released in 2005 in the United States and Europe. Free Radical Design FPS with a local cooperative mode for 4 players, a rich map editor, dozens of playable characters, numerous mini-games, and the franchise's signature offbeat humor.
TimeSplitters - Future Perfect review
4/5
Art direction
★★★★★
"Striking"
4/5
Music
★★★★★
"Excellent"
4/5
Story
★★★★★
"Captivating"
The narrative premise forces an unusual exercise: Cortez meets his own doubles from another moment, so the screen has to display the same character twice, told apart by outfit and by the marks of the period being crossed. The levels are built for those meetings, with corridors wide enough for two.
A single four-note motif crosses every era changing clothes: organ and brass for the sixties, dirty guitar for the contemporary stretches, cold synthesis for the future, bagpipes for Victorian Scotland. Recognising that core under such varied disguises becomes a parallel game.
Time travel is handled as a mechanic of cooperating with yourself: you receive an object from a double, you must later hand it to him, you open a door you had already seen open without understanding why. Free Radical embraces the paradox all the way and draws its best comic scenes from it.
Gameplay
"Excellent"
Fun
"From the very first seconds"
Blending frantic shooting and offbeat humour, this FPS piles on eras, eccentric weapons and improbable enemies. But it's the wildly customisable multiplayer that makes it an institution: four-player matches where chaos and laughter never let up. Direct, generous and fiercely replayable, a classic of friendly console mayhem.
A brisk shooter from Free Radical, TimeSplitters Future Perfect weds wacky time travel, humor and solid split-screen multiplayer. Common in the West but rare in its Asian pressing, its interest lies in this offbeat spirit of a missed studio and these tight runs rather than wide distribution. A piece valued by fans of convivial, zany shooting.
An underrated gem
Packed with humour and nods, this frantic FPS strings together time travel and supercharged gunfights with an unbeatable sense of pace. Released as the genre was finding its feet on console, it didn't get the success hoped for. Its generous multiplayer and embraced arcade spirit make it an ideal outlet, especially with friends on the same couch.
Better with friends
A peak of the zany shooting saga, both cooperative in its two-player campaign and competitive in its frenzied arenas for up to four. You chain missions in unison and unhinged matches loaded with options, bots and offbeat modes. That dual face widens the fun: now you band together, now you trash-talk, and the level editor endlessly renews the urge to come back among friends.
Is TimeSplitters - Future Perfect still worth playing in 2026?
Released in 2005, Free Radical Design's sequel pushes the TimeSplitters formula into a more narrative single player campaign, blending time travel and deadpan humour. The paradoxes staged by encounters with your earlier self remain a memorable design idea. The online multiplayer, the cooperative mode and the enriched Mapmaker keep replay value at the very top. The closure of servers shuts down an essential portion of content and the modelling has aged. Recommended today for fans of arcade first person shooters and for any nostalgic of Free Radical Design's golden moment.
