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Prepare yourself for an adrenaline-fuelled gaming experience that will have you laying your hands on a PlayStation 2, turning to the heavens and screaming 'Hallelujah' until your throat collapses. TimeSplitters is the game that Sony's world-conquering machine was made for - a frenetic, pumped-up 3D blaster with incredibly addictive gameplay, jaw-dropping graphics, an arsenal of awesome weaponry and enough options to keep you nailed to your PS2 for months.

The 'TimeSplitters' in question are an evil race of temporal scavengers who maraud throughout Earth's history, spreading chaos and destruction for their own sinister purposes. In their path is a disparate group of B-movie characters who must defeat them across various time zones to prevent the enslaving of mankind. True, there's no great depth to the storyline - with no cut-scenes to build up atmosphere - but developer Free Radical hasn't set out to make a movie. Instead, it's set out to create a full-on action blaster with the manic, kill-'em-all mentality of id's superlative Doom.

Levels are divided into themes of horror, crime and sci-fi, spread over a century dating from 1935 to 2035. In an unusual move, the main Story mode in TimeSplitters has no single main character that accompanies you through the years - each different time zone features a unique pair of controllable personalities that reflect the period. Hence the 1935 Egyptian tomb level has dapper hip flask-swigging Captain Ash and society gal Lady Jayne, whereas the 1970 Chinese adventure features handlebar-moustached cop Harry Tipper and foxy Charlie's Angels lookalike Christine Malone. Although an admirable experiment, the lack of one unifying personality does make it more difficult to identify with the characters, and involve yourself completely in the atmosphere of the game. However, TimeSplitters is meant to be an arcade-style accessible romp, and the large repertoire of 18 tongue-in-cheek stereotypes does increase the fun you can have with the characters in multiplayer games. Who needs empathy?

A minimum of three playable Story levels are available at any time, with three difficulty settings of Easy, Normal and Hard. As you gradually complete the different levels, further sets of three time zones are unlocked until you have a toy box of nine separate playable areas, which you can dip into at your leisure to unlock stuff like challenges, multiplayer maps, characters and cheats.

Gameplay involves the simple task of retrieving an object and bringing it to a specified location, so, for instance, on the zombie-infested Mansion level your character has to return a murderer's remains to the gallows in order to end an ancient curse. On Easy setting, it's pretty straightforward - pick up weapons and unload rounds into both local foes and the various sneaky TimeSplitters themselves, who possess an unnerving ability to warp into the action anywhere and at any time.

But with the Normal and Hard difficulty settings, a lot more planning has to go into which route you take, how you dispatch enemies and when to grab the limited health boosts and armour, because if you die you have to start the level again. And again. This makes TimeSplitters a heart-in-mouth experience, especially when you're clinging to life, and desperately trying to get back to the designated finish point before psychopathic monsters hunt you down and kill you dead.

Gamers used to first-person shooters on the PC may balk at having to use a Dual Shock 2 controller, but after a few hours play the default system does start to make sense, using the analogue sticks to move/strafe/look around with R1 and R2 to fire - though all the buttons are fully configurable. An Auto Aim and Auto Lookahead feature have also been stuffed into the game to make it easier for beginners to get acquainted with the controls.

Once the Dual Shock 2 has been mastered, you can enjoy dishing out some time-travelling justice with a collection of over 30 weapons. These include small pistols, Tommy guns, sniper rifles, proximity mines, laser-spitting futuristic repeaters and rocket launchers - most of which have an alternative fire mode. Each weapon also has an analogue-controlled crosshair for highly accurate shooting - essential against zombies and mummies that can only be killed by blasting their heads clean off.

As you'd expect from ex-Rare programmers, the level design is excellent, although there isn't quite the invention and realism of GoldenEye, which immersed the player in completely believable, large-scale surroundings - such as a dam, moving train or Cuban jungle. TimeSplitters is consciously more 'comic book' in style, with many superb multi-storey environments that have obviously been influenced by trashy low-budget television and film scenarios. There's the Chinese level, where you can imagine Bruce Lee high-kicking his way out of trouble, or Planet-X, which looks like the kind of world where Star Trek's Captain Kirk would snog a misty-eyed, miniskirt-wearing space beauty, seconds before she transformed into a hideous alien. Depending on the difficulty setting, each level gets increasingly complex, revealing larger, more labyrinthine areas and making it far tougher to complete.

Populating these game worlds is a multitude of crazed freaks, mutants, aliens, hoodlums, soldiers, cyborgs and (er) stewardesses. Each of the enemy characters has been fantastically realised, so zombie cops have torn uniforms revealing half-rotted flesh, whereas goatee-bearded Egyptian cult members stalk ancient tombs in beautifully ornate costumes, each one topped by a neat red and gold fez. Fluid animation brings these characters to life, as they dodge bullets, throw grenades, leap out from the shadows or die clutching their wounds. The AI of the TimeSplitters' adversaries has also been finely tuned, so some characters will run blindly at you firing a shotgun, while others will lie in wait, ready to emerge and let fly a barrage of machine-gun bullets. As you progress through the Story mode, you gradually learn the best way to dispatch each individual type of enemy, choosing the most appropriate weapon for each battle situation - such as a sniper rifle for long-distance kills, or the assault shotgun for in-your-face extermination.

TimeSplitters is a hugely satisfying single-player experience, but the multiplayer Arcade mode is just fantastic. With a PS2 Multitap, you can enjoy a split-screen deathmatch involving up to four players, swearing and shooting at each other in a visceral, lightning-paced battle. Locations for the eighteen unlockable multiplayer maps are taken from the Story mode levels, plus another nine including a graveyard at night, a devastated building site and a supermarket, complete with stacked shelves and cheesy background muzak.

Deathmatch isn't the only multiplayer challenge either - there are another five game types to whet your whistle. Stay alive in Last Stand for as long as possible while protecting a base, or Capture the Bag - a variation on the classic Quake Capture the Flag games - where the flag in question has been replaced with a small, pathetic holdall. More multiplayer mayhem can be had with Knockout, which has teams delivering an object safely to a location, and Bag Tag, a manic rush-about with the winner being the person who holds onto the bag for the longest time. However, the best addition is Escort, where one team has to safeguard a character through hostile territory while the other has to assassinate them by any means possible, resulting in much JFK-style japery.

Got no friends? Hey, not a problem - why not let TimeSplitters widen your social circle with an array of computer-controlled 'bots' that you can program to be as dangerous or dumb as you like? After each fierce multiplayer skirmish, info is given on tops like 'Most Kills Without Dying' and 'Head Shots', plus there are player awards with titles including 'Most Sneaky' and 'Hoarder'. A great option gives all participants in the Arcade mode an opportunity to save their stats on memory card, so a player's individual results can be kept as a permanent record of TimeSplitt-ing prowess.

Challenges are a cracking bonus when you complete the main Story mode on an Easy setting. These take the form of silly timed mini-games that include having two minutes to behead 50 zombies, and keeping hold of a robot brain-in-a-box for 60 seconds. All the challenges are short, great fun and hellishly addictive, coming as a welcome breather if you're finding the Story mode too tough.

However, the icing on the cake has got to be the inspired Mapmaker, which allows players to construct their own multi-level environments using the twenty available building blocks or 'riles'. Designing a map is simply a matter of arranging tiles, choosing the type of coloured lighting, placing items such as weapons and health, then finally deciding on the decor in a kind of sick and twisted version of Changing Rooms. Unlike many clunky PC level editors, everything has been simplified for ease-of-use, so gamers can cut and paste, copy, zoom in and out - all with the Dual Shock 2. Once a map has been set in stone, you can then name it, select a suitable atmospheric piece of music and save the whole lot to Memory Card, expanding the lifespan of the game considerably.

While you're playing TimeSplitters and gawping at the detailed background textures and polygon pyrotechnics on-screen, it's often hard to believe that the game is Free Radical's first PlayStation 2 outing. Although the team hasn't used anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges, the game zips by at such a speed that you hardly notice the notorious 'jaggles'. Powerful explosions, sparks from weapon-fire, bullets the ricochet in all directions, atmospheric lighting and smoothly animated characters all contribute to a stunning-looking game that only rarely drops below a silky 60fps - even on four-way split-screen deathmatches.

The TimeSplitters soundtrack complements the game perfectly, with an eclectic mix of melodies covering Middle-Eastern flavours, kitsch sci-fi, horror movie histrionics and Chinese choons. Expressive and original sound effects finish the aural treat, stinging the air with ear-piercing Tmmy gun-fire, plasma bursts, scorched metal, zombie moans, alien whispers and the death throes of unfortunate characters caught in the lethal cross-fire.

Though it's been produced by a team of ex-Rare coders who worked on the stealth and narrative-led GoldenEye, this is a very different first-person shooter. The plot is paper-thin, and the characters are two-dimensional, but it was always designed to be a pick-up-and-play arcade experience. There are multiple enemies to scythe through with gunfire, evoking memories of the edge-of-your-seat mayhem of Doom - but without the amusing bloody ultraviolence.

Free Radical has emerged as an important new games developer, producing one of the PlayStation 2's most exciting launch titles. Even the name TimeSplitters is appropriate, because you'll lose vast amounts of time playing it - begin a challenge and suddenly it's four in the morning and you'll be falling into a fitful sleep haunted by insane shotgun-wielding humanoid ducks. Grab a copy now for some of the fastest, most full-on fragging of this or any century.

1. Blindingly fast frame rate.
2. Meaty weapons.
3. Cast of weird characters.
4. Addictive split-screen multiplayer madness.

1. Slow loading times.
2. Shallow single-player compared with GoldenEye.
3. No blood and gore.
4. No keyboard/mouse option.

Graphics 90%
Fast, smooth, detailed and imaginative.

Sound 90%
Atmospheric music and realistic sound effects.

Gameplay 80%
Simplistic, but thrilling and addictive.

Lifespan 90%
You'll be playing for months.

Overall 90%
TimeSplitters is a fun, frantic and inventive first-person shooter that every PlayStation 2 gamer should buy. Yesterday.