Being a physicist involved in top secret government experiments can be dangerous. The main character's team has developed a battle suit that can stop, slow and reverse time itself. It can also offer quite a bit of protection against gunfire, but the time control's the thing. One of the scientists, Krone, decides a government pension isn't going to cut it so he snags a suit and takes off to conquer the world. Your character snags another, and you're quickly knee deep in the scary, rainy future ruled by Krone. It's time to join the resistance.

As you move through Krone's forces, your suit's AI will choose a default mode for your time powers - slow, pause or reverse. You can override it, but it's generally making the best choice for the situation. Whenever you use one of these powers, your meter goes down and you'll have to wait until it builds back up before using them again.

Using the powers in combat is as fun as one would imagine. When you make everyone else freeze, you have all sorts of options. You can just run around shooting them, obviously, but you can also take their weapons or pick up ticking grenades or redirect them at the thrower. There will also be times you freeze missiles in mid-air so they're easier to avoid or just blow up. It's a great opportunity to be creative.

But over the course of the game it also creates the opportunity to be lazy. The enemies are pretty smart - they use cover and don't waste their lives blindly. They also try getting around you. But if you want to be as efficient as possible there's nothing stopping you from using the same few techniques over and over to get through the game. You can run forward, freeze time (or slow it down), take out lots of baddies, then run back and wait for your power to recharge before doing it again. There aren't too many instances you'll find yourself doing something new unless you go out of your way to do it.

That's where puzzles usually come in. Quite often, they're included in games as a change of pace, and that's the case in TimeShift. But these puzzles are far too easy and unrealistic to fit well with the tone of the rest of the game. There's so much effort put into creating this gritty, dark world, with very good detail to the people and scenery, that it seems like a shame to break it up with puzzles that involve pausing time to throw levers and jump platforms that make no sense. Here's hoping futuristic soldiers don't really have to ride conveyor belts and pause time to avoid bursts of flame that seemingly serve no other purpose.

Other than that, TimeShift's immersion is very good. The detail and gore of gunfights is raw and gritty without being depressing or too dark for figuring out what's happening on the screen. The characters represent real humans, not the over-exaggerated physiques of so many soldiers in science fiction. The story is somewhat confusing because, even though the cut scenes look great, they don't flow together very well and seem to come up at strange times.

Online, TimeShift offers a good mix of traditional multiplayer and TimeShifting powers for everyone. While you're playing deathmatch and CTF games, you can use Chrono Grenades to create spheres that slow down time. Anything inside those spheres moves very slowly until the grenade runs out, and there are plenty of grenades to go around. With 14 maps, there's a good variety, and some turn into a constant battle of throwing grenades at certain bottlenecks to control the map. But mostly the grenades balance time control powers amongst all the players and add a fun new layer to online battles. There's a team mode created just for those grenades in which each team has a machine with a countdown, and the first one to drop to zero wins. Obviously, you want to lob grenades at the opposing machine so yours goes off first.

TimeShift does some interesting things with the idea of using time control. It's a little familiar to anyone who's played games with bullet time, like Max Payne, but it's original enough to not be called a copycat. But it's not challenging unless you decide to make it so, and the puzzle portions of the game are just silly. Online, it's much more interesting, but harder to find a good game with Halo 3 being so freshly released. TimeShift is fun, but it has flaws and is stuck among a growing crowd of big titles (Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2, etc.) that do much of the same thing.