Timeshift was seven bugs away from completion for Atari last year when Vivendi stepped in and put the game on hold, asking the developers what they would change about the game if they could.

That question spurred a tirade of suggestions and lead to the game being completely overhauled with a slick new look, feel and mechanics for the Playstation 3, PC and 360 game. Or so one of the developers told me in a punctuation-free explanation of why the game is going to kick ass. But all he really needed to do was start up the demo.

This game is AMAZING.

First you need to know that the game is using a proprietary engine. Not that I have an issue with any of the shooter engines out there now, they're mostly amazing, but using them too often can lead to the homogenization of a genre that's already struggling with a general lack of innovation. That's not a concern I have with Timeshift, its got a really gritty, dark look and, much to my delight, in this particular world it is almost constantly raining. Which is awesome when you can stop a rain drop in mid fall.

The general story is that a scientist creates a parallel time stream where he is a dictator. You are sent in to try and stop him, by using a suit with the ability to slow, stop or reverse time. The thing is, this time manipulation isn't like in a game like Prince of Persia (the developer says that form is essentially just an oh shit button). You don't use this to try and reverse what you just did, in fact the time manipulation doesn't affect you but it affects everything and everyone around you.

They should me a lot of very obvious examples of how you can use this. In one case the developer was cornered by two guys with better weapons. Instead of trying to shoot it out with them using his pistol, he froze time, walked up to the first guy and snatched away his better weapon. When time reasserted itself he killed the second guy and the first guy ran over and picked up his comrades weapon, a nice bit of AI.

In another example he jumped down a hole into a room infested with enemies who immediately lit him up. So he reversed time to before they spotted him, hid away and started it back up with them no longer aware he was in the room. Other examples include breaking a window to get into a room and then reversing time to reform the window so no one knows you are there.

Whats so cool about this is that it's not just some neat new weapon, it changes the entire way you play the game. In another example, for instance, the developer fell into a hole and instead of going around and starting his trip across the hole over again he shot a barrel from a nearby ledge into the hole with him. Next he stood on the barrel and reversed time, time-surfing his way back to the ledge where the barrel initially stood.

I am going to absolutely love this game. And the multiplayer sounds even more fun. To make the timeshifting work in multiplayer the developers had to come up with a better system because if you use the one used in single player, people would be perpetually frozen and on one would have fun.

Instead of a suit, gamers in multiplayer are equipped with timeshifting grenades, which come in all three flavors (stop, slow and back). When a grenade goes off it creates a time explosion that's about 12-feet in diameter which lasts for a short period of time. Anyone in that area is affected.

So, lets say someone shoots a rocket at you, if you hit the rocket with a reverse grenade it will fly back in the face of your attacker. Or you could use slow or stop to prevent someone from capturing a flag. It sounds like a whole buncha fun and certainly looked like a whole bunch of fun. I don't know if I'm more psyched about the single player campaign or the multiplayer time-surfing fragfest. Brian Crecente