Timesplitters 4
Man, we gotta go back pretty far in time for this one. Back in the PS2 and original Xbox era, there was a series of games from Free Radical called Timesplitters. The first person shooter series had you play as Sergeant Cortez, the most badass time traveling space marine of all time. You’d go to different eras fighting the evil Timesplitter aliens, from the far future of the 24th century all the way back to the Wild West and China. It was goofy as all hell, but had the fun gameplay and surreal humor to back it up. Also, they were really into monkeys for some reason. You could even play as a zombie monkey in the third one, so you know this series was awesome.
Free Radical shelved the Timesplitter franchise to work on Haze for the PS3 in 2008. But that game didn’t do so well in terms of reception and sales. This failure, combined with the development of another game on this list, had the studio go into administration later that year. In February 2009, the studio had been picked up by Crytek and as Crytek UK, they worked on the multiplayer for Crysis 2 and co-developed Crysis 3 alongside Crytek Frankfurt. While Crytek does currently own the rights to the franchise and had even talked about the possibility of a fourth entry in the Timesplitters franchise for a while, they later said that it wasn’t in development in 2012. Crytek’s Cevat Yerli said the reason they didn’t move forward with Timesplitters 4 was because to them, “nobody would accept this apart from some fans, and we don’t know how big that fan community is unfortunately“. There was talk of a fan group developing a Timesplitters mod with CryEngine 3, and the team does regularly provide updates on development. There doesn’t look to be a finalized date out for a demo or to show off footage, but who knows? Maybe this’ll be the year we get to travel back in time and play as a monkey slicing up people in feudal Japan.
Chances of returning: Moderate.
