
	Platform Playstation 3 Genre Shooter Publisher Namco Bandai Developer Namco Bandai ESRB T (Teen) Released November 20, 2007

- Feel of the arcade game in your living room - Simple, straightforward gunplay - Guncon 3 is a solid controller

- Limited continues!?! - Cheap hits lead to many aggravating deaths - At $80US you'll have to really think before making this purchase

Review: Space Ace HD (PC) Review: Heavenly Sword (PS3) Review: Time Crisis 3 (PS2)
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Time Crisis 4

Score: 6.5 / 10

Stand-up arcade shooters are awesome and I’m on a bit of a nostalgia high after reviewing Space Ace HD so it was with great pleasure I started playing Time Crisis 4.

After setting up the sensors and calibrating the included Guncon 3 – a big orange gun with buttons all over it, a couple of control sticks and a trigger – Time Crisis 4 was so obviously going to score high marks that I felt I should slap an “8.5” on it and move on to the enormous pile of games I’m supposed to be reviewing. But then I started to actually play it.

Time Crisis 4 has a great arcade vibe to it; from the cartoony graphics, strange

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exposition, and non-stop audio effects, it feels very much like an arcade game.

Then it encumbers you with a paltry number of continues – three to start with more unlockable as you get further into the game. I didn’t pay for the Guncon 3 or Time Crisis 4 – Namco Bandai was nice enough to send both – but if I had I would have been pissed off. The package costs $80US and the first

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thing it does is slap you in the face with three meager continues? That’s like ending a date with an attempted handshake that’s answered with a slap to the face.

The tried and true arcade convention of ducking in and out of cover as the game takes you along a predetermined path makes Time Crisis 4 feel a lot like the old arcade games. Also held over is that fact you’ll get hit by seemingly unavoidable projectiles. As an arcade games, the developers want you to die a lot so you keep pumping quarters into the machine, but here it feels misplaced. I don’t want to die over and over because I can’t see a knife incoming then not be able to continue because I don’t have any left.

The Guncon 3 is a very comfortable peripheral to use; it’s light and very easy to setup. Time Crisis 4 attempts to make use of the two sticks with its first-person modes but it just never felt right to me – it feels really clunky.

There are also some extra modes, including the original game, that are packed into Time Crisis 4, which you’d likely play as time wasters.

It’s become obvious after reading a handful of other reviews of Time Crisis 4 that my subjective opinion is outside the norm. Most fault the game for its retro aesthetics, clunky first-person controls, lack of innovation and, of course, the kick-to-the-groin number of continues available at the outset. I’d actually have to agree these criticisms I just don’t think it detracts from the overall arcade-like vibe that I want from a game like Time Crisis 4.

- Omni

(November 29, 2007)


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