Tick, Tick, Boom
Time Crisis 4 has arrived and it's everything you'd expect a Time Crisis game to be, maybe even a little more.
Published: November 20, 2007
The sequences are a novel attempt to deviate from the original arcade game, and they do provide far, far more of a side and back story to the wafer thin plot of the original, but this is Time Crisis; it doesn't really need a whole lot of thickening up. The fact that a bunch of shooting gallery mini-games were included too are a nice addition, but one does sort of wonder if trying to mess with near-Engrish lines and wholly implausible "stories" is even needed. Not only do the slower, much longer sequences throw off the pacing of the storyline, they're really only useful as a novelty or perhaps a bit of a tech demo for what the new Guncon can do.
Whether it was a deliberate move to keep the separate modes more cohesive or just a byproduct of the development team's focus, both the FPS and arcade segments look, well, like a PS2 game upscaled to HD. Don't get me wrong, all of the interaction with the world, the destruction and seeing all the bodies flail around as they're hit is a blast, but the game just doesn't look like it's running on a PS3. Technically, this makes a lot of sense, since the assets and original arcade game were designed for Namco's System Super 256 arcade boards, which are essentially a PS2s guts with a few tweaks. The Time Crisis games have never been especially pretty, but the fact that there are actually times where something that looks like a PS2 game has framerate issues. Clearly the PS3 is not being tapped to any real degree here, and it's kind of a shame.
The audio is likewise a very obvious carry-over from the arcade experience. This means plenty of cheesy lines delivered with plenty of unintentional humor (or maybe it is all intentional, who knows), though there was obviously an attempt at making the storyline more intelligible for the FPS sections. Again, how necessary it all was is questionable, but hey, it's meant to be bad. The slightly muffled sound effects and familiar "get ready" klaxons are in place too, but part of me misses the licensed music. The stuff that's in the game is actually pretty decent in an action movie sort of way, but nothing will beat the forest shootouts from Time Crisis 2 while music from The Rock played in the background.
Once again, the home version of Time Crisis 4 provides the perfect vehicle for getting a new Guncon into the hands of light gun freaks the world over, and once again, Namco has poured plenty of extra goodies into the port to sate those who have barreled through the arcade quarter muncher, but there is a feeling that perhaps the team bit off more than they could chew. The FPS segments are certainly a novel idea, but they probably could have been better served in an entirely new game for the PS3 that really took advantage of the hardware. I'm not knocking the effort, since it's essentially a free add-on, but compared to the pristine, speedy action of the arcade game, it ultimately falls flat.
Time Crisis 4 is an instant buy for long-time fans of the series. It really is a damn fine game, and the new Guncon has some potential for great games. At its core, the arcade game represents the perfect approximation of what it'd be like to be in a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick, and though it's over quickly, while it lasts, it's a blast. Those looking for something that's legitimately next-gen in a light gun shooter will have to keep waiting or look somewhere else, unfortunately.