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Like Time Crisis 3, you've got a submachine gun, a shotgun, and a grenade launcher in addition to your standard pistol, though these secondary weapons require ammo that you can pick up by repeatedly shooting specific color-coded enemies. At several points, you'll have to defend a location for a set amount of time while enemies come at you from multiple directions. The game says you can point the GunCon3 at the edges of the screen to move between the different positions, but in our experience, this is far less reliable than just thumbing at one of the analog sticks. There are some fun moments in the arcade mode, such as a sequence where you're the gunner on a helicopter as it sweeps through skyscrapers while engaging enemy choppers and ground units. But too much of the game is still beholden to rigid light-gun convention, and it feels like you've gone through all of these fights a hundred times before. The arcade mode is short, though the way the game metes out continues and extra lives means that it'll take at least a few runs before you'll get through the whole thing.
The complete mission mode is Time Crisis 4's grand gesture toward modernizing the light-gun game. The results are tepid at best, taking the basic structure of the arcade mode and haphazardly jamming some lengthy new first-person shooter levels in between the traditional, on-rails levels. The basic controls are the same as any console-based FPS, using the left analog stick for movement and the right analog stick for looking around. The twist is that you still aim your weapon with the light-gun part of the GunCon3, basically giving you a third axis of movement to wrangle with, which just complicates things and makes the action feel unwieldy. The actual FPS levels are embarrassingly rudimentary, relying on the same basic jack-in-the-box enemy concepts as the light-gun portions of Time Crisis 4, though with the addition of some bad jumping sections and a painfully slow movement speed. The moments when the game tries to get a little trickier, such as a boss encounter or a fight with a helicopter, really reveal how poorly the FPS controls work. Trying to track a fast-moving enemy while trying to manage your position, where you're looking, and where you're aiming is just a chore.
They really have no idea how ridiculous they look.
The FPS stuff in the complete mission mode also looks pretty terrible, with lots of flat, wide-open spaces sparsely populated with boxy objects for enemies to jump out from behind. The tight staging of the light-gun levels make them feel a whole lot more dynamic, but there's nothing in Time Crisis 4 that makes it look like a PlayStation 3 game. From both a technological and an artistic perspective, it looks a whole lot like the late-'90s arcade games from which it was spawned. It has lots of shiny, over-lit environments that look too clean and sharp to have ever actually existed.
Time Crisis 4 is a game that almost seems ashamed of being a light-gun game. Unfortunately, its attempt to transition into a full-on first-person shooter almost comes off as a 10-year-old parody of an FPS, which ultimately just makes the whole package feel all the more dated.
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Where to buy
Time Crisis 4 (PlayStation 3):
$59.99 - $89.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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RadioShack.com
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$89.99 | Yes |
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$79.99 | Yes |
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$81.99 | No |
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$59.99 | Yes |
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Amazon.com
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$59.99 | Yes |
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