Metareview: TimeShift (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

The flood of games isn't stopping any time soon, so it's best to pick your purchases wisely this holiday season. Sadly, unlike the main character in TimeShift, you won't be able to purchase, play, reverse time, and get something else in an endless loop for the last two months of '07. TimeShift's demo was not impressive, forcing us to call the game TimeScript because we had severe issues not being able to save characters in scripted events that could easily be saved. If the main hook in the game is about messing with time (a convention we're well versed in at this point), it better work right and bring something new to the table.

• Game Informer (78/100): "The arsenal used to dispatch these smart soldiers has some definite standouts. While the standard rifle is handicapped due to its much-too-large reticle, most players will gravitate towards two particular guns. ... While exploring your time-altering gifts will keep your attention for several levels, halfway through the game you'll start to feel déjà vu as you move through the clichéd warehouses and engineering plants. To make matters worse, the simplistic environmental puzzles feel recycled from past titles. TimeShift also isn't above the occasional laggy sequence or game freeze."

• GamePro (75/100): "Maybe if the game had actually met its original development schedule, its gameplay mechanics could have come across as innovative, but at this point in time, TimeShift comes across as derivative and a little tired. That doesn't mean the game isn't good. It definitely has its moments, especially once the time bending powers become unlocked. There's something definitely satisfying about freezing time, chucking a grenade into a pack of soldiers and watching as the hilarity ensues. But as I was playing the game, I just couldn't shake the feeling that I had done it all before."

• GameTap (60/100): "Several times you have to use time manipulation just to make platforms move around because whoever built these magical blocks of metal apparently forgot to make them logically functional. Seriously, who would build an elevator that moves so quickly that the only way you can make it from the switch that turns it on to the elevator itself is to break the flow of the space-time continuum? ... Oh yeah, and fire? Forget about it. If you don't pause time while traveling down a conveyer belt with fire spewing from both sides, you're toast. I don't necessarily hate the fact that you have to use time control to get by these obstacles, but I do dislike the fact that a good number of these obstacles are old first-person shooter standbys that have been given a thin coat of paint by the time-shifting mechanics. "