Singularity.
Weapons
There's about 8 different weapons in the game, 6 that you can carry around with you and a further 2 that are given to you at specific moments. You can only carry 2 of the equipable weapons at a time, meaning it can be quite the tactical choice as to what two weapons you'll use, or even what you'll swap out.. Made even more difficult by the following segment...
Upgrades
You can upgrade weapons in 3 areas, Clip Size, Reload Speed and Damage. Each of these have 2 levels. You purchase these upgrades with weapon upgrade boxes, which costs 1 for the first level of the upgrade, but 2 for the second, meaning a total of 3 points per type of upgrade, or 9 to fully upgrade a weapon.
Additionally, any weapon you pick up will have its purchased upgrades applied, so it can be of worth to upgrade weapons you maybe don't use all that often but the game has a tendancy of throwing at you for specific moments (the sniper rifle, the machine gun) to make those moments just that little bit more easy.
Missed oppurtunity: Now overall I really liked the system. It allowed me to improve my weapon capacity in one area, and thus tailor my combat style. This gave me the edge in some instances but crippled me in others, and I feel that's pretty fair. Especially when ammo's running low and you have to make the choice between dropping your super-upgraded gun, with only one clip left for the full clip but relatively weak not-so-favouritest gun.
No, I feel the missed oppurtunity was with the upgrades themselves. They're too generic.
Let me give you an example. The Sniper Rifle had a temporal dilation ability, basically a time slow, whenever you were aiming down the sight. Now, I can make the sniper a 1 hit kill against most enemies, I can give it a relatively huge clip and allow it to reload in under a second, but I can never increase that time dilation bar, giving me more slowmo. Not even increase its regen.
Why not give a 4th option for weapon upgrades, specific to each weapon? Why not increase the amount of shrapnel out of a shotun, or give it knockback? Why not make the pistol have a chance to freeze enemies (a la the cryo-tanks), making it NOT the most useless weapon in the game? Or even just increase its switch speed, so that you can quickly pop it out to take on some enemies before swapping back to another?
Why not give the grenade launcher faster grenades? Or a larger blast radius? Why not give the Valkyrie machine gun lower recoil?
All these things could have been implemented easily, and made the weapons a lot more fun.
Time Freeze
Once you unlock the time-freeze move I dare anyone to actually have any problems with this game. Seriously. slows bullets, stops all but the most powerful enemies, who will still be slowed and are easily handled with a shotgun blast/machine gun barrage. It's the "I win" button of the game, and if you have it fully upgraded becomes almost hillarious to use.
It's about time.
The problem I have with time travel games like this, is that the time travel is purely a plot device. Sure, some of the weapons and many of the items kinda have an element of time-manipulation, but I can think of only one instance in which you travel through time for a purpose other than advancing the plot.
You go back in time. You take a crate. You go back to the future/present. You age said crate, making in flattened and dilapidated, you place said crate under a half-opened gate, you return it to it's proper age, expanding it and forcing the gate open.
You travel through time, to solve one puzzle. With a box.
A box.
A box that could have been lying around anyway.
See, I don't really have too big an issue with this overall, as Chrono Trigger, Time Splitters (more 2 and 3) all have time travel, but they're not player controlled, they're plot driven, but they make sense within the games they're in.
I just feel this is another missed oppurtunity, where time travel is a flimsy plot device, especially considering the time-travel device is constantly strapped to your arm!
The giant fail...
Big spoiler warning here.
So the whole game, all its events, everything that occurs is down to the fact that you saved the life of this one random guy at the start, who turns out to be an genius super-villain. So as a final act you go back in time to shoot yourself, saving this guy, to ensure that the events could not unfurl.
Why can't you just shoot the guy your past self is carrying? I mean seriously, someone missed a massive trick with this...
Eurgh.
End of Sproilers.
Anyway, it was fun, worth a buy, though I won't be replaying it any time soon.
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