The Power of Three
No, it's not Charmed. Time Crisis: Razing Storm is a three headed monster that is uncoordinated and stumbles down a flight of stairs. On fire. A few times.
Published: November 18, 2010
Now let’s turn our attention to the game itself. Razing Storm is quite the experience, with all of the destructible environments and armored suits/mechs running around. This part of the experience is basically an action movie that never stops. The action is frantic, the explosions are everywhere, and it’s all because of you, the player. The only part that really seemed to let off of the throttle was the sniper section, but that can also turn into a hot mess with some misses or body shots instead of hittin’ ‘em in the head.
The story itself, well, let’s just toss that aside. With games like this you can’t really penalize it. The characters have no real personality and their voices are annoying, so there’s that. The sense of accomplishment that goes with blowing up the giant tanks or hitting a weak point is satisfying enough. Arcade mode is the highlight of this package, but unfortunately it’s not enough to carry the awful adventure mode. In this one, you have to use the not just the gun but also a DualShock 3/Navigation controller. Adventure is supposed to tell the story of Bravo Team, who is handling a completely separate mission than Alpha. I commend Namco for trying to do something different and take this section off of the rails, but as I quickly learned, Time Crisis really needs its training wheels.
In order to turn, you have to point the Move in the direction you like. There’s no sweet spot as I constantly found myself looking up at the sky, down at the ground, or just too slow to catch up with moving targets. No matter how much I tinkered with sensitivity it was still a mess. After beating a small portion of it, I had to put this section down. It just did not improve, in fact, it got worse at boss fights that required me to (gulp) move and shoot at the same time. I was somewhat alright as long as I could anchor myself to one position, but there was no way to keep trying unless I wanted to break another DualShock 3. Perhaps the Navigation controller does some wonder beyond what I could ever comprehend to transform this otherwise clunky mess into a hidden gem. As far as I know though, it doesn’t.
