TimeShift
Clocking in.
In combat, too, enemies are a bit too thick and generic to be troubling or interesting. Better ones, who dash around with their own primitive time-shifting gizmos, are more of a challenge, but once you pin them down and lash an explosive cross-bolt to their heads you're laughing. Albeit only on the first few occasions. And while we can understand enemies paused in time failing to react to being hit, surely the real-time one we've just shot in the chest with a shotgun ought to tweak a bit prior to the killing blow?
Environments and narrative development are a bit pedestrian too. The bleak dystopian opening is evocative of Terminator's future bits mixed with Half-Life 2's Breen voice-over opening, but quickly descends into a fairly simple set of running battles and siege elements, after which everyone says how amazed they are that you survived. You're amazing! You don't feel it. One good set-piece has you zipping through a building under heavy fire from the biggest ED 209 rip-off in history, but like the spinning blade it's the exception rather than the rule. Most of it lacks verve, and falls into bad old habits: snowy bit, sewer bit, turret bit, train ride. There's a certain satisfaction to riding a zeppelin doing a bit of Han Solo turret-gunning (don't get cocky) and using slow-mo to neuter the jet-planes, but that's more a case of laughing at a typical FPS scenario you've always groaned at because now you have the upper hand.
Played online, you get to deploy special time grenades, which slow down objects caught in their blast radius, and this has potential, which couples well to the overpowered weapons and makes things approachable for anyone who's spent a couple of hours tooling around the single-player. But it's by no means essential, and whether you're playing on PC or Xbox 360 (PS3 comes later), there are better ways to kill people already.
The latter point is TimeShift's problem all over. We've already had one good, and far more energetic time-fiddling shoot-'em-up recently with Stranglehold, but even if you didn't like that you can still reach for The Orange Box or Halo 3, both of which do offline and online FPS action with much more intelligence and imagination. It's not that TimeShift's a bad game; it's just a bit flat and uninspired, and doesn't add anything to the genre, or even the sub-genre, apart from a neat little phrase to use when you're referring to "time-shifting" abilities.
Graphics whores will like it - it's a solid 30 frames per second despite the occasional explosive indulgence, delivering tons of detail and some natty lighting effects - but, again, there isn't anything new here, and there needed to be if TimeShift was going to leave any sort of mark. As it is, the things it does are rife with potential it doesn't really exploit, and the result is adequate but nothing more - worth picking up in the January sales when you've overdosed on the competition, perhaps, but otherwise unremarkable. So, to return to the original point: no.