10 More Underrated Video Games Way Ahead Of Their Time

TimeSplitters 2, man.

There's an entire generation of gamers who remember rushing home from school to play this masterful multiplayer FPS with their friends for hours on end, and though the series sadly never became a wider breakout hit, it remains much-loved by basically anyone who did play it.

Developed by Free Radical Design - primarily ex-Rare employees who worked on the innovative GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark - TimeSplitters 2 was a tectonic leap from the basic-but-enjoyable first game.

Beyond its playful, cinematic campaign, the real meat of TimeSplitters 2's gameplay was its mesmerising multiplayer suite, which took the already-amazing multiplayer of GoldenEye and injected it with a weapons-grade dose of steroids.

With more than 120 wild and wacky characters to choose from, it's easy to see the game as a predecessor to the glut of Hero Shooters today, focused on players being able to express themselves through their colourful avatar.

And then there's the expansive array of multiplayer modes, from basic Deathmatch and Capture the Flag offerings to the legendary Virus mode, where one player must infect all others with a disease, tag-style, to end the game.

Throw in a bevy of challenge modes and meaningful unlockables, and it's clear that TimeSplitters 2 paved the way for the modern shooter, even if it's difficult to imagine any contemporary multiplayer FPS offering so much content in the base package.

Nowadays, most of these characters would be carved out and sold off to players through DLC and microtransactions, and so it'll be certainly be interesting to see how the in-development new TimeSplitters game will navigate the changed gaming landscape.