Time Crisis: Razing Storm

Review from Matt - Monday, 17 January 2011 @ 12:31am

The Time Crisis series is old. Like, very old. When Yug and I worked together many years back in an actual office, that actual office had a Time Crisis 2 machine. Our boss bought it because it was so old. Basically an antique. The point I'm stumbling towards is that 10 or so years ago, Time Crisis 2 was old. Think about that.
Not for too long.

Since that time there have been a number of additions to the franchise, brilliantly called Time Crisis 3 and 4, but the latest is Time Crisis: Razing Storm.

Fans of words and their origins (also known as "virgins") would spend a bunch of time now talking about the word "razing" and its frequent misuse by confusing it with either rising or raising, neither of which are related. The term "razing to the ground" sounds like a bizarre thing to do to anything but an underground city, but it is in fact perfectly correct due to the actual meaning of "to raze" being to destroy, or more specifically to scrape off or away. You can in fact see the same word in "razor", a blade that obviously scrapes off the hair.

Why am I talking about this now, I hear people wondering? Because it's either that or talk about the damn game.

It took me a while to understand what it was that I didn't like about this game. The fact is, it's silly. Everything that happens is silly. The action is silly. The story is silly. The cutscenes are silly. The voice acting is very silly. This is not unusual, if you have a look at a game like House of the Dead: Overkill it's really very silly. And they say "fuck" a lot. But that's beside the point.

So why did the silliness of House of the Dead appeal to me while the silliness of Time Crisis: Razing Storm just annoy me? Everything was the same. Slightly bodgy graphics, dodgy storyline, awful writing, a sense of the B grade. House of the Dead: Overkill and Time Crisis should be bestest buddies, peas in a pod, compadres, they should be judged by the same standard. And then it occurred to me. Time Crisis: Razing Storm isn't silly.

It's just stupid.

There's a very big difference between those two. That difference lies largely in self-awareness, in a willingness to do something silly because it's fun or is itself a trait of some kind. Overkill's tongue is in its cheek, while Razing Storm's is lolling out, with drool dripping down it.

I'm not sure what action I should take here. Jump? Run? Yodel?

I should probably dispense with the unpleasantries and get down to brass tacks. I am, after all, a highly regarded reviewer.

Time Crisis: Razing Storm is, as often happens with these kind of games, a port of an arcade title. The arcade machine differed from most of these shooters by the use of a giant machine gun peripheral instead of the traditional handgun, and that was always going to be a challenge to recreate. It would appear that absolutely no effort has been made to do so, and instead the move controller or its handgun attachment suffices as a peripheral. This isn’t actually a criticism. There was never going to be a giant machinegun peripheral for it, nor should there be.

Razing Storm sees you jumping in at the start in the middle of a war between… your guys and the enemy. Honestly the whole thing is so silly I have no idea what’s happening. The point is basically just shoot at everything that isn’t a goodie until you die or win.

What Razing Storm adds to the Time Crisis franchise is collateral damage. A lot of effort has gone into making sure that stuff smashes or explodes when you shoot it, and now that the emphasis is on fully-automatic heavy machine gun fire rather than pistols you have a LOT of bullets going around willy nilly.

You really do shoot a lot of things. Stuff goes everwhere. That's pretty cool.

The damage systems are well implemented. Bits of concrete and plaster spray up and around you as you chip your way through marble of foyers and smash up glass. It gives a nice sense of carnage, of action and silly fun.

There are essentially two ways to play this game. One is to use the Move controller “naked”, and the other is to put it into the $30 official gun add-on device thingy. Being the sap I am I shelled out for two of those things so that I could play this (and other games like it) with my son.

Personally I’m fine with this. There’s something about using a non-gun as a gun that just is weird. It takes away the fun. Granted, it’s not as horrific as playing it on a controller, ala Time Crisis 4’s PS3 release.

But playing with the gun controller reveals one of the biggest flaws of Razing Storm , besides the overall level of derp: reloading.

Bad men. See if you can determine what strategy we shall employ here.

In the arcade machines there’s a pedal on the floor, and that pedal makes you hide. It also makes you reload. (More accurately I should say that releasing that pedal makes you reload/hide, but anyway.) The GunCon 3, Namco’s official peripheral for games like this on the PS3 that was bundled with some versions of Time Crisis 4, has a bunch of buttons on the back that can be used for this.

The move controller, and its associated gun holdery thing does not have any such thing. All of its buttons are on the top. This means that in order to hide or reload, something you do every few seconds, you need to be able to press the top of the gun. Holding it straight out (like a fucking gun) won’t do. You have to hold it artificially close to you to be able to reach, making play awkward and unnatural.

This could have been easily fixed, simply by making holding the gun straight up (for example) the same as pressing a button. Not having an option for this, or better still making it the default, is unforgiveable.

Not pictured - your aim drifting steadily towards the left and down a bit

There was a worse bug, however, that I couldn’t help noticing. I don’t know for sure if this was a bug in the game or in the Move itself. This was a “drift”, and if you google around you can find that I’m not unique in finding this. I can’t put my finger on what exactly causes it (nor is it my job to do so) but it does appear to happen specifically to the second controller of two player games. What occurs is that over time the controller’s aim drifts off to the side, towards the left in my case. Careful calibration of the controllers doesn’t fix the problem, but shows comprehensively how absolutely atrocious it actually is. You can literally watch the cursor disappear off the screen in about 20 seconds of holding the thing rock solid.

This CAN be fixed. We experimented with it a bit and found that through a combination of turning off and on the controllers were WERE able to get a stable and consistent setup that did not have the drift. This suggests that the game is at fault. However, I’ve seen similar types of drift on other Move games (especially alternative awful shooting game The Shoot) which leads me to wonder whether there’s a core flaw in the Move itself.

Time Crisis: Razing Storm is actually pretty good value for money in one way. Though the game is quite short it’s not just a single game. There are three games. Unfortunately they’re also very short. Fortunately.

The other games that come with it are the vastly superior Time Crisis 4, upgraded to fully support the new Move controller for the PS3 as well as the original GunCon3, and Dead Storm Pirates, a game of such silliness that it really had to be included free or face mockery.

Yes. They have magical golden guns. What of it?

I want to talk a bit more about Dead Storm Pirates, because it does deserve a mention. Time Crisis 4 is a decent game, and Time Crisis: Razing Storm is not. But I’m less decided about Dead Storm Pirates.

The silliness quotient is so high it should be a Wiggles song, but it seems like it’s deliberate this time, self-aware, though not in a Skynet sort of way. That makes it a lot more palatable. You also don’t have to reload, thanks to the rather silly guns that don’t use bullets. Because of magic. There’s an interesting mechanic that means both guns hitting the same target do more damage, which is actually a pretty good idea and a way of encouraging teamwork. There are also fairly silly bits where the guns become ship cannons, for example, and you have to take out incoming ships full of baddies. It’s silly (sorry I keep using that word) but it’s fun. It’s not great, and as a stand-alone it would be not worth the price of entry, but it’s not a bad jaunt.

The titular game on offer here, Time Crisis: Razing Storm, is really not worth the payoff.

I should add one point, though. I didn’t like it much, but I did get to play a fair bit of it with my 10 year old son, and he thought it was a cracking bit of adventure and unquestioning violence. So there may be a place for it. If you have young kids and you don’t mind them learning that all their problems can be solved with guns, then have at it. It will almost certainly be more fun for you on the Move than the majority of the current rather childish titles.

Pros

Can be relatively fun. Nice to have something other than kids party games on the Move. Graphics aren't bad, and are at least bright and colourful

Cons

Horrible story, horrible writing, horrible acting. Gameplay bugs like the drifting impair enjoyment, and the reloading process is idiotic with a gun controller.