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  • Awesome Music:
  • Best Known for the Fanservice: Jo-Beth Casey and to a lesser extent Venus Starr, to the extent that some don't know that the former is from the TimeSplitters series.
  • Breather Level:
    • The Wild West level of TimeSplitters 2 is a very simple, straightforward shootout level that comes directly after the Unexpected Gameplay Change Stealth-Based Mission in Neo-Tokyo, often considered the most frustrating level in the game, and is followed by the hair-pulling Timed Mission in Atom Smasher, the annoying puzzle-heavy level in Aztec Temple, and finally the Robot Factory, which is considered the hardest level in the game.
    • Much of the Honorary League in Arcade League in TimeSplitters 2 is this, especially after the Virus series and the Men in Grey mission, at least until the "Outnumbered But Never Outpunned" series, where it becomes difficult again (the Arcade League in TimeSplitters Future Perfect is more linear in its difficulty progression, notably the Virus series is located in the Honorary League instead of the Amateur League).
    • Similarly, in TimeSplitters Future Perfect, the mission "You Take the High Road" takes place after Something to Crow About, which involved tough robots, two bosses (and the one at the end is especially nasty), Rolling Robots, and many high stakes obstacles. The former involves the same Mooks from "Scotland The Brave" plus more, so the threat is much more sedated.
  • Catharsis Factor: Arcade: Amateur League: Nightstick: "Dam Cold Out Here". First, fire your flare gun at a snowman. Then listen to the screaming. Repeat.
  • Common Knowledge: Tom Clarke-Hill's voice as Cortez is so iconic that many people forget he wasn't actually the original voice (even IDMB falsely lists him as such). As shown by the names of the soundfiles, Cortez's actor in TimeSplitters 2 was Everal Walsh. It also doesn't help matters that Clarke-Hill and Walsh's voices sound almost alike.
  • Complete Monster: Jacob Crow, from Future Perfect, is a founder of the Brotherhood of Ultra Science and the creator of the titular TimeSplitters. Desiring to become immortal, Jacob organized cruel experiments on hundreds of people, turning them in to either mindless mutants or zombies. Learning about Time Crystals and their power, Crow uses them to travel in time, acquire large amount of wealth and power to create his own company, which he uses to breed a special race of mutants, the TimeSplitters, and uses them as genetic material to turn himself into a grotesque, half-robotic creature who doesn't age. When Sergeant Cortez from the year 2401 travels to the past and tells Jacob that his TimeSplitters drove humanity nearly to extinction, Crow simply laughs it off, saying that TimeSplitters are genetic superiors to humanity and they should annihilate and replace humanity.
  • Contested Sequel: TimeSplitters Future Perfect is often considered inferior to the second game either due to abandoning its GoldenEye roots and/or being very glitchy. However it's usually regarded for more emphasis on the story and some well done humor to make up for it, as well as the more modern aiming system being far more user-friendly.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • TimeSplitters 2 has the Sentrybots in "Robot Factory". They're often armed with plasma rifles or homing rocket launchers, and they take a ton of hits to kill.
    • The zombies from the original TimeSplitters count as well. They cannot die off until you shoot their heads off, and when coupled with a shotgun and nearly unfair placements, make for some nasty encounters.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: With such a big cast of characters, this was inevitable, especially with how diverse and unique they are.
    • There's a good reason Captain Ash and Harry Tipper have appeared in all three games.
    • Judging multiplayer characters, we have strange, funny characters like Duckman Drake, Robofish and the Impersonator.
    • Despite her having a minor role in Future Perfect, Angel Forge has a modest fan-following.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • Anya looks a lot like Jo-Beth Casey. Could the teenage girl she constantly rolls her eyes at actually be her 15x-great-grandmother?
    • The Time Assassins in Future Perfect resemble human versions of the Scourge Splitters from the previous game. It's possible they are sent to kill those who Crow considered threats to him and are rewarded by becoming part of his "superior species". This is backed up by some Dummied Out lines ("Kill them! And we shall live forever!").
  • Even Better Sequel: The first TimeSplitters is a decently fun, but flawed first-person shooter. The second game improves upon it in nearly every way, and is near-universally considered a vastly superior experience.
  • Fanon: The multiplayer-only maps have no assigned time-period, but that doesn't stop the fans from matching them to story mode levels using their aesthetics, bot-sets and Arcade League missions that take place in them.
    • Streets and Compound are from the same period as Neotokyo.
    • Mexican Mission is in the same era as Wild West.
    • The Hangar map belongs to Khallos.
    • Ufopia comes from the "Planet X" era.
    • Scrapyard takes place during or after the Machine Wars
    • Ice Station takes place in Cortez's "present" time.
    • Temple is from Captain Ash's period.
    • Venice is the sequel to Notre Dame starring Viola, Mr. Underwood, and Jacque de la Morte.
  • Funny Moments: Future Perfect's singleplayer mode is rife with them! Here are some highlights of the funnier scenes.
    • Cortez sees Jo-Beth trying to break into a house through the window. Then he points out that they can just use the front door.
    • Hearing scary noises, Jo-Beth tells Cortez to go down a ladder first. Cortez looks at her short skirt skeptically before shrugging and doing as she says.
    • Jo-Beth's dialogue as she's hanging from the ceiling while zombies approach. "This reminds me of prom night!"
    • The older, time-traveling Crow meets the younger Crow and gives him the time device, his Evil Gloating undermined by Time-Travel Tense Trouble.
    • Cortez and Amy Chen's awkward small-talk as they wait for the elevator. Then, Amy being so weirded out by Cortez's Catchphrase she decides to just get the next elevator.
    • Cortez confronts Crow about the evil plan he hasn't come up with yet, basically giving him the idea in the first place. When the younger Crow appears to give him the time device and tell him what to do, the older Crow cuts him off because he already knows. Cortez's "DAMMIT!" is so loud it can be heard through time.
    • Keely gives the Time Assassins a Rousing Speech before sending them off to kill Cortez in front of an Embarrassing Old Photo of Cortez dancing in a leopard speedo and a "Mr. Space" beauty contest sash.
    • The R-110's last line before it dies from an electric shock is "I only wanted to be loved."
  • Game-Breaker: The sawn-off Shotgun in the original TimeSplitters, which has two modes of fire: a shot with a surprisingly low amount of spread, and a secondary that condenses all the pellets to almost rifle precision. If most of the pellets hit a target, only armor will save them from a one-shot-kill, and the gun both reloads fairly quickly and has two shots, which is almost invariably a kill in the right hands. The developers seemed to realize this too, because certain Story levels give the AI the Shotgun which turns them into hyper-accurate Demonic Spiders.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In what is seemingly a quirk related to hitscan, using the aim function to zoom in on a flaming zombie's head will trick the game into thinking you've scored a headshot, killing the zombie instantly.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: What does Big Tony say when Jake Fenton finally reaches him? "FEN-TOOOOOON"!
  • Memetic Mutation: "The Daily Struggle", a derivative meme image based on the "sweating towel guy" which depicts Hank Nova struggling to decide between a choice of two buttons. Many are unaware the person in the image is a TimeSplitters character.
  • Once Original, Now Common: One of the most widely praised elements of the series is its visual style, which combines realistic models, textures and lighting systems with exaggerated character designs and animations. In some ways, TimeSplitters was ahead of its time now that many modern games aim for a similar mix of realistic and cartoonish elements in their visual presentations. TimeSplitters thus may come off as significantly less unique today, especially as the ageing graphics take away some of the style's shine.
  • Porting Disaster: The Xbox One digital download port of Timesplitters 2 used to have massive acceleration in aim mode, causing your crosshair to fly halfway across the screen at the slightest nudge with no way to adjust it in-game. It was since fixed in a patch.
  • Retroactive Recognition: The main antagonist in Future Perfect, Jacob Crow, is voiced by Wayne Forester, who later went on to voice the legendary heropon, Riki.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: In all three games, the fact that even in single player the AI enemies can headshot you. That's perhaps understandable, but the AI doesn't deliberately aim for specific body parts; it's pure luck whether a stray bullet will hit you in the head and deal a ton of extra damage or not. This can lead into outright Fake Difficulty if you get unlucky.
  • Scrappy Weapon:
    • In TimeSplitters 2, the Sci-Fi Handgun is often a bigger threat than the basic mook in Robot Factory. The lasers fired from the pistol always bounce off surfaces if they didn't hit a target, and were fired in three-shot bursts, often resulting in your own lasers hitting you. Future Perfect allowed the reflection mode to be turned off (and it is by default), making this weapon far safer to use.
    • The Lasergun fired a slow laser that had to be charged up to do any real damage, quickly eating up its ammo. The shield used by the secondary fire didn't last long and only served to burn ammo faster. It also had an irritating glitch where the Lasergun's "charge up" noise would become really loud and play endlessly at the spot you were standing when you were unlucky enough to trigger it. Its replacement in Future Perfect, the Sci-Fi Sniper, fixes all of these issues.
  • Sequel Difficulty Drop: Pretty much everything is much easier to handle in Future Perfect than in TimeSplitters 2. The infamous Virus Arcade League missions are much easier (and take place in the Honorary League instead of the Amateur League), the aiming system is more precise, the story mode's Hard difficulty isn't as mercilessly difficult as the one in the previous game, ammunition is excessively plentiful, and more characters and features are unlocked at the start.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • Future Perfect uses higher-poly models for between-level cutscenes. For in-level cutscenes, only the characters' faces are high-poly. This is most obvious during the first Time Paradox in "Scotland The Brave", where there's a shot of Cortez's hand holding a key, and his hand is essentially a solid brick.
    • When Cortez catches up to Amy in "Breaking and Entering" the gun she threatens him with is not that time period's LX-18 Pistol, but rather the 9MM Pistol native to Harry Tipper's era.
    • The cutscenes have occasional clipping, such as the rope Viola slides down in her debut passing through her hat and Amy Chen's ponytail impaling her arms when waiting for the elevator.
  • That One Boss:
    • The most frustrating level in TimeSplitters 2 also has the most frustrating boss. Khallos comes from behind you once you enter a wide-open room, meaning you have nowhere to take cover. On higher difficulties, an endless wave of Reapers and Scourges (the only level to have both at once) spawn in to assist him. Taking him down isn't enough, as you also have to pull three levers that have rather finicky hitboxes.
    • The first battle with Jacob Crow in the tenth level of Future Perfect. The problem mostly comes from getting the three most obvious weapons and then not knowing where the fourth weak point is. They're two side-mounted missile launchers, but they're not immediately visible.
  • That One Level:
    • "Mansion" in TimeSplitters. It constantly spawns zombies behind you, and many of them are armed!
    • TimeSplitters 2:
      • "Neo-Tokyo" in , which opens with a lengthy Stalking Mission.
      • Atom Smasher. First off, it's a Timed Mission. It increases every time a bomb is defused. There are five (four in easy) of them and the the time limit stops if all of them are defused. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! You the player cannot defuse a bomb, so how do you defuse it? Have a nearby scientist NPC do it, and if all the nearby scientists are dead, kiss your win goodbye. One of them is a crane game which doesn't require a scientist at all. In hard mode, there are no scientists near the second bomb. Instead there are two of them are on fire on the other room with checkpoint, and they will die if the fire is not put out fast enough. Oh, and the only checkpoint is near the start of the level.
      • Robot Factory. With dozens of robots often teleporting in on you, stronger robots that take a lot of hits to go down and wield the deadliest weapons in the level, turrets and floating mines waiting around corners, and your default weapon's laser being able to bounce back and hit you, this level is frustrating to beat even on Easy difficulty. Good luck getting the Rad Racer cartridge on Hard.....
    • Future Perfect:
      • "Mansion of Madness" in TimeSplitters Future Perfect. On top of legitimately being pretty creepy, the level's incredibly small weapon selection means you'll be using the slow-loading shotgun for almost everything. The fact that the zombies take a ton of damage on every part of their body except the head means you could end up wasting precious ammo on one of them whose head just won't come off. Then there's the climb up to and out of the attic, where the level really throws the zombies equipped with shotguns at you. Because of the shotgun's slow reloading time and small number of shots between reloads, it's very easy to get pinned down and shot while you're reloading.
      • "The Hooded Man" in Future Perfect. You have to protect your past self from Time Assassins and TimeSplitters until he gets to the base it doesn't get bad until the Splitters show up though.
      • "Something to Crow About". Powerful enemies who can fill you full of plasma in a few seconds, shielded enemies you have to switch quickly to the Electrotool and back to defeat, flying mechs not unlike the "boss" of U-Genius U-Genix, annoying rolling robots, the stage is long, there are two bosses, and the latter of those two bosses is That One Boss.
  • That One Sidequest:
    • "Burns Department" from TimeSplitters 2 is probably one of the hardest arcade league missions in the game, despite being in the Amateur League; the game mode is virus, a variant of tag where you instantly lose if you touch an "infected" player. There are nearly ten AI players ready to catch the plague, and absolutely ''no'' effort to avoid anyone that's "it". There's no radar, which practically renders everyone invisible, and the map is as claustrophobic as can be. The weapons aren't at all powerful, so camping is a failing strategy. Sadly, a gold medal (which requires the player to last at least 2 minutes) is required to unlock a certain character, so you'll have to perfect this mission to get 100% Completion.
    • "Top Shot". It's an Elimination match on Hangar, and the gold requirement of completing it within 3 minutes is pretty easy. The platinum requirement of 1 minute 10 seconds, however, is so absurdly difficult that it is not uncommon for players to spend hours attempting it.
    • "Men In Grey". It's an Assault match, so you have to dodge autoguns and Accountants/ Consultants /Lawyers while completing objectives and destroy the fuel barrels and computers. You only have a partner to "help" you (read: distract) the opponents, who are most likely happy to mow both you and your partner down with miniguns while you are busy reaching the first objective. Getting a gold or a platinum medal is hard, but not as much as other matches.
    • "Can't Handle This". To sum it up, it's you versus an army of five Handymen in the Nightclub, so your best option is to grab a pair of Tommy Guns and hide out in the foyer so you can mow down any Handyman unlucky to be in your line of fire. Have fun dying repeatedly when you're trying to grab a gun while trying not to get wasted by a Handyman or two.
    • "Superfly Lady". Similar to "Men In Grey", but in the Hangar instead of Training Ground. Unlike "Men In Grey", where it is possible (but difficult) to dodge autoguns, you have to destroy the autoguns in front of you as your first objective. It gets a bit worse in the second objective, not only because the switch opening the hangar doors is above you, but because there are a couple more autoguns present. Afterwards, where you have to destroy the fuel barrels to complete the match is easy, the autoguns present (and sometimes, the AI opponents) will make it hard for you. In a nutshell, shitfest.
    • "Bags of Fun". It's Capture the Bag at the Ice Station with you and Sgt. Cortez against an army of 'Splitters. Simple enough, right? Not really. Not only are there five of them against two of you, they also have high stamina, and your partner, sadly enough, only serves as distraction. Talk about "useful partners," my ass.
    • "Nice Threads". Assault match, yes, but this time it's on Scrapyard, so prepare to meet a trio of Sentry Bots and a whole bunch of autoguns both outside and inside. The Scrapyard Assault map itself is full of Fake Difficulty, as two weapon slots are found only at the start of the level, with one of them being designated for the Lasergun in "Nice Threads". You're meant to use its shield function to bypass the turrets and rush your way to the first checkpoint. Getting to the second checkpoint is borderline unfair as a single rocket-launching turret monitors the corner leading into that area, which almost always simply kills you outright.
    • In Future Perfect, earning the gold medal for the Astro Jocks level is an extremely difficult task. The stage it takes place on is not suitable for free-for-all matches, as it's separated into two areas connected by linear corridors with only a few small windows allowing for combat between the sections which are woven in between one another. Certain characters are beefier than others which is a bad thing considering it takes place in Elimination mode, where player deaths count more than kills do. The platinum medal is all but impossible.
    • "Playing with Fire" in TimeSplitters 2 is notorious, though less for its difficulty. It's fairly trivial to work your way up to a gold, by optimising your route each playthrough, figuring out the quickest path to grab every banana... But an unfortunate glitch makes it impossible to achieve a platinum rating if a player ever gets a gold, due to an issue with how the game updates your score. The only solution is to restart the console before the game saves.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some of the changes from the second game to the third.
    • The new Mexican Mission moves the blue base in Capture the Bag from the roof to the basement, while this removes an unfair advantage the blue team had, it puts the bases too close together and essentially makes half the map unused. A better option would have been to to move the bag to the staircase.
    • The new Training Ground is missing all the turrets and cameras.
    • Team deathmatch spawns have fixed spawn points for each team rather than it being randomized. This is favorable on some maps while making others a bit more stale and less chaotic.
  • Underused Game Mechanic:
    • The "Ufopia" map in TimeSplitters 2 is not used for any Arcade League or Challenge missions, while the "Site" map is only used for one.
    • Future Perfect introduces the Time Disruptor Grenade, which causes time to slow down for anyone caught in its radius, giving you the chance to shoot them while they're stuck in slow motion. It also emits instant damage upon impact. It's an incredibly creative weapon that also looks fantastic in motion, but it is sadly consigned to just two story missions ("Breaking and Entering" and "You Genius, U-Genix") and nowhere else, likely due to troubles implementing slow down in multiplayer.

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