Time Crisis 4 Review (PS3)
Namco Bandai did something pretty gutsy with Time Crisis 4. They took an arcade light-gun game, ported it to a console that wasn’t exactly flying off store shelves, packed it with a custom peripheral, added some new content, and put it on the market at a premium price. The end result? A very good arcade port that takes advantage of the PS3′s feature set and introduces a pretty high-quality peripheral.
The Rundown
Time Crisis 4 for the PlayStation 3 includes Namco Bandai’s home console port of the arcade game of the same name, a Complete Mission mode of first-person shooter missions, and a set of Mini-games. It supports 1 or 2 players in offline-only play. The game ships with one GunCon 3 controller, but the second player can also use a second GunCon 3 or can opt to use a standard SIXAXIS controller instead. Since Namco Bandai won’t sell GunCon 3 controllers separately, you won’t be getting a second GunCon 3 for a friend to play along unless you buy two copies of the full game.
The retail package ships with the game disc, a setup manual, the GunCon 3, and a set of sensors. The game comes in a standard case with box art and a manual, leading me to believe that if the game catches on it could be sold separately. The setup manual clearly illustrates how to set up the sensors to hang on the top right and top left of your TV screen and gives you a number of pictures of how not to set it up, oddly enough. Next up is the GunCon 3, which connects to a USB port with a reasonably lengthy cable. Lastly is the set of sensors which also connects to a USB port.
The Hardware
Special attention should be paid to the hardware that ships with this game primarily because it is surprisingly sturdy, it’s well-made, and it works very well. Setting up the sensors on the TV is an easy process and the sensors are well-made and configurable. Check out the video below for how the sensors look and fit onto the TV.
The GunCon 3 is another well-made peripheral and aside from not being recognized as a controller by the PS3 it has a bevy of buttons on its bright orange, two-handed frame. The left-hand portion has a left stick called the A stick, shoulder buttons called A1 and A2, and an A3 button by clicking the left stick in. The right-handed, trigger portion of the GunCon 3 has a thumbstick B stick on the back along with B1 and B2 buttons, with a B3 button available by clicking the stick in. Finally there are C1 and C2 buttons on the left side of the gun itself.
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It all works together very well, and calibration of the GunCon occurs when you first fire up the game and it’s always accessible when you pause the game. Incidentally, the best way to discover if you’re misaligned is to play the target practice mini-games.
Installation
During the first time running the game you get the option to install just under 2.5 Gigs of data to the hard drive and the end result are very short load times. This gives you a very fast, arcade-style feel to the game, reinforcing the overall experience.
Gameplay
The Arcade mode, as I mentioned is a straight port of the original Time Crisis 4 arcade game featuring one or two player light-gun shooting on rails. The presentation is on the cheesy side with traditional announcer dialogue and voice-overs you might also find in introductions of other Namco Bandai games, and the advice from your support team is bland and also clumsily translated. It works, and for a straight arcade port everything looks spot-on. The GunCon control is precise, the shooting is very good, and the segments where you point offscreen to switch between different views to fend off waves of enemies work nicely. The Arcade mode of the game succeeds very well at giving you a fun, arcade-style experience, right down to the limited number of lives and all the challenges that presents.
“Chop at the barricade or kill the player shooting at me from the barricade? Which should we do first?”
The second game mode is the Complete Mission mode, a set of first person shooter missions where they take away the on-rails aspect of the Arcade game and set you in a number of more open environments. You can opt to control the main character using both sticks on the GunCon 3 together as in a traditional FPS, with one moving and the other aiming while the GunCon still gives you direct shots at a target. Or you can switch on a mode where one stick moves the character while the GunCon can point at an edge of the screen and turn the view. I found the latter to be more intuitive but still sometimes problematic when I’d get disoriented during a boss fight.
“It takes a very steady hand.”
While the graphics engine is really very good for the Arcade mode, the more open levels of the FPS mode makes the graphics look more simplistic at medium and longer distances. And while the Arcade mode is an all-action game, the slower pace and controls of the FPS mode slow things down and don’t compensate with anything more compelling than enemies materializing at certain points and popping out from nearby obstacles with an occasional boss fight thrown in for good measure. The same cheesy translation style of the dialogue is in this mode, but instead of being quick and moving the mission along rapidly you have more time to be subjected to it, making it stand out more and break some of the immersion the first person light-gun gameplay aims for.
To be fair it was an interesting gamble to add this mode to the game, and there is potential for this kind of gameplay but I really don’t think the controls are tight enough to warrant this kind of game. I would have been significantly happier with a separate set of on-rails levels, even if it was a completely different environment and story. The challenge of popping in and out of cover in a heavily scripted story is what makes the Time Crisis games fun to play in arcades and in the Arcade mode. The FPS mode just doesn’t have that same pull.
According to the official site a third game mode called Crisis Missions is available which I wasn’t able to unlock. As described by IGN you need to finish both the Arcade mode and the FPS game mode to get them. They are apparently a set of exercises set within existing environments measuring marksmanship and hitting certain targets with a certain amount of time, so these don’t really qualify as a full-fledged set of on-rails missions that would, for me, improve this title’s appeal. High scores are all well and good for offline play but if all they do is unlock more target practice, only the light gun fans will go the distance.
Unlimited machine gun ammo is never a bad thing.
Lastly, the Mini-games you get at first are all target practice missions, but I wasn’t able to progress far enough to unlock anything else in that section of the game. Given that all of the scoreboards are offline only, I really wasn’t motivated to try too hard at the target practice games and I found it much more difficult to hit the moving targets than to shoot the enemies in the Arcade game. Light gun enthusiasts looking to get the most mileage out of the game with friends are probably the intended audience for the mini-games.
The Last Word
The relatively high USD 89.99 price tag (already tempered by sale pricing at 59.99) keeps Time Crisis 4 from being a must-buy for most people, and since you really need the gun to make the game worthwhile renting this game really isn’t an option. If you have an urge for a great and faithful arcade port this game is for you, especially if you have deep-pocketed friends who want to get a second copy to bring in another GunCon 3 to the mix.
Given the high quality hardware and excellent arcade port Time Crisis 4 gets 3.5 Aeropausonauts out of 5.
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