TimeSplitters

Its story levels last about three minutes each. That is not a criticism, it is the design: grab the artefact, fight your way back to the start, done. Free Radical Design, staffed by people who had just finished GoldenEye 007 at Rare, arrived at the PlayStation 2 launch with a first-person shooter that flatly refused to tell you a story. Nine time periods, a thin excuse about a shape-shifting alien race, and no cutscenes worth the name. What it had instead was speed.

That speed is the whole argument. The engine held a rock-solid frame rate at a time when most launch software was gasping, and the controls, once you rebound them, felt closer to an arcade cabinet than to the cautious console shooters around it. Enemies pour in from fixed spawn points, the levels loop back on themselves, and difficulty tiers change objectives rather than just padding enemy health. Play a stage on Hard and you are running a longer errand through the same geometry, which is a smarter use of small maps than most games manage.

The real content sits off to the side. Arcade mode and the challenges dole out unlocks from a roster well over a hundred characters deep, and the selection tells you everything about the studio's sense of humour: cyborg chimps, mutant cows, a Victorian gentleman, a woman in a beehive hairdo. Four-player split-screen with bots was the reason the disc stayed in the machine. The MapMaker, crude as it is, let you bolt corridors together from tile sets and drop your own deathmatch in place, years before user-generated content became a marketing word.

What has aged is the single-player. With no plot, no dialogue and levels built for repeat runs rather than momentum, the campaign feels like a set of time trials wearing a costume. The sequels fixed that, and TimeSplitters 2 in particular buried the original under sheer volume. The first game is thinner, harder-edged, and oddly more honest about being a score-attack shooter in a 1960s wallpaper pattern.

It holds up as the thing a launch title rarely is: a game confident enough to ship without padding. Turn on four controllers, pick the monkey, and the twenty-odd years since barely register.