Pros: The game disk can be used to scrape crud off of bathroom pipes.
Cons: Soils the good name of the Time Crisis series.
The bottom line: Namco takes the simplest action game shooter formula and completely destroys it. Controls that might work for a Resident Evil game completely fail for Time Crisis 4.
The original Time Crisis, released in 1994, was a stunning 1st person rail shooter in the arcade which introduced two very innovative features to the genre. The first was the Guncon which was a lightgun that was ultra-accurate (to a fault) and the second, was the step pedal, which was a foot operated button that when pressed, allowed the player to activate a duck&reload mechanism in-game to simultaneously reload his gun and duck incoming fire. Up until this time, most 1st person rail shooters, had the player simply shoot off screen to reload, and relied on the player killing enemies as quickly as possible as the only means of defense.
Besides these two innovations, Time Crisis also introduced a time based gameplay mechanism which allowed the player to continue playing so long as they were not killed in-game or did not run out of time. This allowed skilled players to last the entire game on just one credit.
The final, and perhaps most controversial feature of the Time Crisis games where the design of the Guncon itself – it featured a force feedback slide design that made it react like a real gun when fired...blowing back as if to disgard and rechamber rounds.

Needless to say, the game was extremely popular with many different age groups across both genders. It looked and felt very realistic and was damned fun to play…even when a single credit cost $1.00 in quarters.


Time Crisis 4 takes everything that was good about its predecessors and literally kills those details with poorly thought our “innovations” that not only betray the spirirt of the game, but make the entire package disappointing.


CONTROL

The most damning feature of Time Crisis 4 is the new Guncon controller, the Guncon3. First of all, to meet safety standards set forward by the government/ BATF, the guncon controller is an ugly bright Orange. Its quite similar to taking a SIG P223 and then gluing a playstation’s left analog stick and hand peg to its side – and then spraypainting it orange. Its got a cheap plastic feel through and through.

The analog stick is necessary because some idiot at Namco felt that a game of this nature required first person shooter style walking as if the player was using a Nintendo Wii’s Nunchuku. (more on that later). Add to that, a second analog stick on the back where a hammer ought to be and you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you if you intend on playing for more than 5 minutes.

The Guncon is ugly, and will give you carpal tunnel syndrome faster than a pencil designed for the left-handed.

Control should have been simple.
Here is a gun…shoot at the screen. Nothing more than that.
Back when the original TC and TCII were big, I purchased the true arcade Guncon replica, complete with functioning slide and the pedal ! Each set cost $50, but it was worth that much just to feel like I was actually bustin’ caps at the onscreen bad guys.
In order to function with the high-definition television you likely are using with your PS3, the Guncn comes with a sensor bar similar to that of the Wii. It is ugly too, but you can at least place it on top or in front of your Wii with minimal visual intrusion.

Traditional Guncons relied on Cathode ray tube synchronizing to maintain their high level of accuracy. The Guncon 3's Infrared sensing isn't as accurate as the Guncon's, but it is reasonably accurate considering Infrared sensing is terrible for lightguns.


GAMEPLAY

Some parts of the game feature the rail-shooter sequences veteran Time Crisis players know and love, but eventually, you switch up into a stage designed with the crappy control scheme where you must plod around while stopping only to shoot, before you move on. Its just as bad as Red Steel is for Nintendo Wii, only, because this is PS3, the graphics are more extravagant. The levels are large, expansive and nicely detailed with enemy characters who have high poly counts near you and progressively lower at a distance. The SOUND FX are loud and boisterous and the MUSIC is the typical heart pounding techno you’d expect to hear from a Namco title. Everything with the exception of the control seems to be right with the game, but it is the control itself that kills the entire experience.

How exactly do you justify heart pounding music when you have just run into a dead end?
Dead ends are frequent because many of the maps degenerate into labyrinths which no game in the Time Crisis serious should ever have to suffer through.

Shooting enemies is made less interesting by the fact that you’ve got to make your way around the levels manually. In any Time Crisis game, shooting enemies is supposed to be as easy as Whack-A-Mole…only… with a gun.

Unfortunately, the voice acting is horrible to the point of distraction and the enemies aren’t interesting to kill. Nowadays, I’m looking for M-rated shooters, so it only makes sense to me that shooting an on-screen bad guy should result in “Call of Duty 4 style arterial blood sprays and bullet wounds complete with black gun powder tattooing. What I get is enemies who are literally encased in body armor – appearing as if they’d been warned of an upcoming gunfight and were allowed to go on a shopping spree at Rainbow 6 headquarters. They look like green stormtroopers with all that armor, yet, one bullet drops most of them.

MULTIPLAYER

If you have a huge LCD or other high def Tv, TC4 allows you to split the screen up with a friend to play it down vertical viewscreens. Obviously, the game is better the larger your TV is.
STUPIDLY Time Crisis 4 does not feature online play? How the hell do you even release a Playstation 3 game without online play? This game was always designed to be a multiplayer game from arcade to home version yet there is no co-op online mode here. Considering you now have a funky controller that forces you to walk around, I’m surprised there is no deathmatching.

STUPIDLY Time Crisis 4 doesn’t come with a two Guncon in the box option like Time Crisis 3 did. If you're not willing to rebuy the whole game for a second Guncon, Player 2 will just have to whip out their SIXAXIS... *sigh*.


SUGGESTIONS

Time Crisis 4 was a failed opportunity to put a “killer app” in the Playstation 3’s library. (a game worth buying the system for).
What Namco should have done was used the design from the original arcade Guncon and kept the recoil slide feature – something they’ve never offered to the home consoles. Strangely enough, Nyko, Pelican and a bunch of other 3rd party manufacturers have offered Guncon replicas with the pedal and slide that look just like real guns…with cords.

If it was absolutely necessary to bring Time Crisis into the “next generation”, then Namco could have gotten smart and offered a floormat control pad similar to the one used by Dance Dance Revolution to allow you to “run” or “walk” at different speeds in order to move through the rail sequences. Look at me, I’m exercisin’ !!!!
That’s not even a bad idea for the arcade version considering I’ve seen arcade game makers do a lot more. Snowboarding games, DDR, Jet plane fighters,etc. There was even a game called “Tokyo Cop” where you had to bend left or right physically to dodge bullets onscreen.

OVERALL

Why is it that the classic Time Crisis gameplay is found in levels that last a few minutes but, the crappy new FPS levels make up the bulk of the game? Someone at Namco has fouled up and given us a game that doesn’t deliver the excitement of its predecessors while trying to bring more to the table.

This game is so bad that it makes me wanna’ pull my old Guncon out and fire up my Playstation1.