Namco was a company on the rise in the late 90s, their newfound popularity driven by quality conversions of some of their then-awesome arcade titles such as Tekken, Ridge Racer and Time Crisis. Though the presence of the arcades has declined significantly, Namco still continues to release new versions of these titles to the arcades, followed by a console port. The latest Namco arcade port to hit home is the PlayStation 3 version of Time Crisis 4.

Images from the game prologue. The enemy are approaching... Wait!

Some of you might be surprised by the fact that a fourth Time Crisis game exists (chronologically speaking; Project Titan and Crisis Zone are side stories) – it hit arcades in late 2006, but Namco had decided not to port it to the PS2 due to the difference between the power of their Super System 256 arcade board and Sony's home system. Instead, they've decided to clean the game up a bit and release it on the PlayStation 3. Namco also handed development duties to Nex Entertainment, the team behind Time Crisis 3. As a result, the game plays much like the third game in the series, but throws a few ideas of its own into the mix. Unfortunately, it's those extra little ideas that really drag Time Crisis 4 down.

The first thing you'll see upon opening the Time Crisis 4 box is the Guncon 3. This thing is a monstrosity - an engineer's worst nightmare. The basic design for the Guncon 3 is your standard old light gun with half a PlayStation controller wedged in the left side, two analogue sticks and buttons all over the place. The analogue sticks are really loose, and use the nipple-like design from the GameCube's C-Stick, making it difficult to make precise movements. Due to the heavy penetration of high definition sets, the way the Guncon has to work has changed. Players now have to place two infrared sensors on the top corners of the television, which means that the gun works more like a glorified Wii remote than the CRT guns of old. Calibration can be especially difficult – the game is very fussy about your distance from the IR sensors and the amount of light present in the room. It's also impossible to get the gun to fire dead on; even with taking the utmost care and aiming through the gun's equivalent of iron sights, it'd still fire about 1cm off to the left. It's something you just have to get used to.

However, the disappointment caused by Time Crisis 4 cannot be entirely blamed on the new Guncon; the gameplay does more than its fair share to dishearten fans of the series. There are two main gameplay modes – the arcade mode, and the Complete Mission, which is a first person shooter mode, made exclusively for the home version. Both revolve around the same characters and central plot line, which involves a terrorist threat against the United States. Of course, it's not just your standard "We hate America and thus will blow crap up" threat – the source of the terrorist activity comes from within the American military; one of those fancy secretive divisions. This particular division just happened to be working on a new biological weapon called the Terror Bites, which they decided they could use to gain a bit of leverage. It's your typical campy arcade storyline, but unlike previous Time Crisis titles, the fourth game attempts to force its plot down your throat at every turn.

Terror Bites - Make sure you get that tetanus booster...

Time Crisis 4's arcade mode is pretty much the same as what we've come to expect from the series. There are four stages, with each broken up into several phases. Time Crisis 4 retains the same multiple gun system seen in the third game, meaning players have a machine gun, shotgun and grenade launcher in addition to their regular pistol, though these secondary weapons have limited ammunition. It adds very little to the formula; the only legitimately new addition in Time Crisis 4 are the Terror Bites, though the multi-screen action has returned (for those who don't know, multi-screen action previously featured in the PlayStation-exclusive side game Time Crisis: Project Titan). Terror Bite sequences usually involve finding the best weapon to deal with them, then holding the trigger down, hoping that you don't miss any. Multi-screen sequences usually involve soldiers or Terror Bites attacking the player from three or more directions – players will have to suppress the forces of evil on one screen to give them enough time to manage the other. The game instructs players that they can switch screens by pointing the gun off screen, but this tends not to work as well as it should; using the stick to flick between screens is a much better option.

Arcade mode has its moments – particularly the start of the second stage, when players take command of a helicopter, but the experience just feels really flat. Time Crisis 4 really does nothing to take the series forward, and the new elements it introduces only really serve to frustrate the player. The gameplay is pretty much the same as ever – you could almost call it "Time Crisis 3 HD". I'm not suggesting that Namco needed to reinvent the wheel here, but they really needed to add something to Time Crisis to make the experience a little less stale. It really feels like you're running through the motions, especially when you consider that you'll need to run through the game several times due to the rather limited number of credits provided for your initial play session. Multiplayer is also a bit of an ordeal – Namco has decided not to sell Guncon 3s separately, so your partner must either purchase a second copy of the game for a second gun, or play with a controller, which is less than adequate.

Complete Mission is essentially Nex's attempt at making Time Crisis into a first person shooter. It's not the first time someone has tried to do this in a light gun game – see the Resident Evil Survivor series, and to be frank, while the idea sounds good on paper, it's absolutely awful in practice. In the average console first person shooter, the player only needs to focus on movement on the left stick, and aiming on the right stick, but in Complete Mission, you've got to worry about movement on the left stick, positioning the screen with the right and aiming using the gun. Difficult mechanics aren't the only problem though – the level design consists mainly of empty, boxy, open spaces with very sparse numbers of enemies distributed without, making levels ridiculously tedious. Part of the appeal of light gun games has always been the tight, dynamic pacing, and Complete Mission just does not offer anything remotely interesting.


Reader, meet the Guncon 3
When you put the pieces together, Time Crisis 4 seems remarkably average. The Guncon 3 is a really clunky, poorly conceived peripheral; all Namco really needed to do was create a version of the Guncon 2 that was compatible with HDTVs, instead of giving us this freakish mutation of controller and hand gun. The arcade game does nothing to advance the gameplay beyond what was offered in Time Crisis 3, so it feels like you're just running through the motions again, albeit with a different story. The Complete Mission mode is an utterly tedious mess; the idea sounds good, but the execution is horrific. Given the high price of entry and the distinct lack of light gun games on the horizon, Time Crisis 4 isn't really worth the time or effort involved, except for the most dedicated fans of the series.