Review

Time Crisis: Crisis Zone

By Bones
October 20, 2004 11:43 AM PST
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Time Crisis: Crisis Zone makes its way from the arcades to you home with a few additions and revisions. But is it worth your time?

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As far as wacky peripheral-based games go, old staples like light-gun shooters are quickly dying out in the face of the growing fad of sweaty dance-pad games, but the innovative Time Crisis series still lives on. As the latest installment in the shooter series, Crisis Zone builds upon the arcade successes of its Time Crisis predecessors as a high point in the series, but (as the lesson goes) popular arcade quarter munchers don't always translate perfectly onto home consoles.

If It Moves, Shoot It

In keeping with arcade story standards, Crisis Zone throws you headlong into a half-baked plot to reclaim a newly built commercial plaza on the outskirts of London from an elite terrorist army bent on world domination. The action in Crisis Zone, however, is consistently fast and enjoyable with each stage having a distinct appearance that offers unique scenarios for the attacking hordes of enemy soldiers and keeps the battles feeling fresh and exciting on the initial play through.

Visually, Crisis Zone is well above average for its genre--a feature you come to appreciate as you happily blast away at the destructible environments just to see how accurately the backdrops react to your bullets. And thanks to the high accuracy of the GunCon 2 controller, the challenging confrontations rarely feel cheap or unfair.

Short-Term Crisis

Crisis Zone is a great arcade light-gun game, but it does suffer from a few notable flaws--chief among these being that it is, in fact, an arcade light-gun game. While it's always great to see an arcade title faithfully ported to a home console, Crisis Zone is nearly too arcadey for its own good as both story mode scenarios can be completed in well under an hour on the normal difficulty setting.

The game does attempt to boost the replay value by offering a number of minor unlockables and additions like new weapons, a handful of Crisis Mode mini-games, score rankings, and dual gun-wielding action--a cool feature for gamers with two GunCon 2s. Without any multiplayer modes or longer scenarios, Crisis Zone is an undeniably short (but fun) game that's best enjoyed as a weekend rental by those outside the diehard Time Crisis fan base.