TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is a 2005 first-person shooter video game developed by Free Radical Design and published by Electronic Arts for the GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox video game consoles.
It is the third game in the TimeSplitters series, following TimeSplitters (2000) and TimeSplitters 2 (2002). The game features a single-player mode consisting of levels where the player assumes the role of Sergeant Cortez, a time-traveling marine from the 25th century, as he attempts to go to the past to save the future. The game also includes a range of multiplayer options, including cooperative gameplay during story mode. Online play was included in both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions, which has since been disabled.
Gameplay
The Arcade and Challenge modes both allow the player to unlock new characters, weapons, and new locations for Arcade (excluding league) that the player can then use in the game's mapmaker feature. The player can complete various missions and league challenges to receive awards, new characters and medals. Once the player completes a mission the game automatically saves progress. In challenges and Arcade Leagues the player earns awards. Bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals can be acquired.
Mapmaker
After the original TimeSplitters, Free Radical Design decided to include a level creator in the TimeSplitters series. It includes tiles, character spawns, items for specific game-modes (such as a briefcase in "capture the bag" game mode) as well as the option to change the lighting and also add pre-determined "bot sets", that is a group of up to ten characters to regularly appear on the map. The same goes for weapon sets.
This form of Mapmaker limits the player to a selected number of tiles. It also allows basic features such as the addition of gun turrets, weaponry spawns and health and armor locations. It also features numerous backdrop items which vary on the maps "tile-sets", such as a sarcophagus in the "Ancient Egyptian" tile-set, and a remote control robotic cat, named Strudel.
The advanced version allows players to create a complex map as long as space is free. It contains all the features of beginner mode, as well as extra tile shapes, and backdrop features. it also features complex story mode features allowing users to create detailed and in-depth story maps of their own creation.
Plot
The game begins in 2401 when the space marine, Sergeant Cortez, is leaving the space station that he destroyed at the end of TimeSplitters 2. His ship crash-lands on the future Earth, and two fellow marines greet him. Sergeant Cortez follows his squad of marines through the valley and battles unknown masked figures and TimeSplitters. After arriving at HQ, Cortez is tasked with following signatures in the past that were created by time travel and thought to be caused by the TimeSplitters. He goes on a mission to go back in time to find a way to stop the TimeSplitters race from being created, with the help of Anya, The General's personal assistant.
Using his Temporal Uplink, a device connected to the Time Machine, both of which Anya has invented, Cortez travels to the small Scottish island of Urnsay in the year 1924. There, he meets a man named Captain Ash, who seeks Cortez's help. After raiding a castle with Captain Ash, Cortez confronts an unknown man with a high concentration of Time Crystals, who then escapes with his own time machine. Cortez then travels to 1969 to stop Khallos (whom Cortez thinks is the time traveler) with the help of hippie secret agent Harry Tipper, to rescue his girlfriend, Kitten Celeste. After defeating Khallos, Anya reveals to Cortez through the walkie-talkie on his Temporal Uplink that a mansion in Connecticut had burned down in the 1990s, leaving behind residue of Time Crystal energy.
In 1994, he is greeted by a teenager named Jo-Beth Casey, who was tasked with photographing the mansion's zombies by her friends. She tells Cortez that the house is haunted, and the two battle zombies and ghosts inside the abandoned mansion. After discovering that the creator of the TimeSplitters is a mad scientist named Dr. Jacob Crow, Cortez embarks on a new mission to foil the scientist's plans by destroying his labs throughout all of the time periods that Crow had visited. After an abrupt farewell to Casey, Cortez travels to 2052, where Crow has advanced his gene-splitting experiments. Cortez meets Amy Chen, a highly trained spy sent to defeat Crow as well. They both fight through his lab facility to find Crow, who escapes again.