I’ve long been a fan of lightgun games. My all-time favorite is Namco’s Point Blank series. But when it comes to the more gritty and realistic lightgun games, the Time Crisis series has to be given proper respect. In my opinion, it started out inferior to Sega’s Virtua Cop, a series which it directly competed with in the arcades, but over the years Time Crisis has established itself as a benchmark for the more realistic lightgun shooters. And while the series may be getting a little stale, Time Crisis: Crisis Zone adds a couple of new features to entertain the gun fan.

The setup is all too familiar. Terrorists have taken over an urban shopping/office complex. It is up to the gamer as Claud McGarren, leader of the first platoon of the Special Tactical Force, to root them out. Yeah, yeah, very exciting.

Where Crisis Zone differs the most from previous games in the series is in the player’s primary armament. Previously the player’s main weapon was a pistol with unlimited ammunition. Other weapons only showed up as power-ups or limited-ammo secondary weapons. This time the player’s main death-dealer is a sub-machine gun with unlimited ammo. It makes the game a little more of a spraying affair rather than the more precision aiming game it used to be. The change is both good and bad. It is fun to hose an enemy with a machine gun, but at the same time it was very satisfying to make that great precision shot. In the end it will probably come down to a matter of taste when determining if the change is attractive for the individual gamer.

Of course considering how tough the enemies are, it is a good thing the player’s firepower has been increased. These guys aren’t some half-assed, revolver-toting jerks in T-shirts. They have strong armor and good weapons. Taking them down requires the heavier punch of an SMG.

A more cosmetic change to the game is the shield carried by McGarren. Where previously the “duck” command had the player using any convenient piece of environmental cover to hide behind and reload, Crisis Zone has the player carrying a shield that is brought up in front of the player to protect him from enemy fire. There is a slit in the shield that gives the player a limited view of the world while he is under cover. The shield basically works the same as ducking behind environmental cover, but there is something quite satisfying about using the shield.

The game still plays out in typical Time Crisis fashion: waves of enemies followed by a large, hard-to-kill boss character that requires a prodigious amount of lead to his vulnerable points in order to take him down. This is one reason the series is getting to be a bit stale. We’re just not seeing much innovation in the lightgun genre.

Graphically Crisis Zone is only a marginal improvement over the other Time Crisis games that appeared on the PS2. There are more effects around the over-the-top pyrotechnics and the destructible environments also make for some cool fun as glass shatters and store merchandise flies. The audio is fair and conveys the action of the game well enough but shows little improvement.

In the end it is just not quite enough. While a solid lightgun game in the classical sense, Time Crisis: Crisis Zone just does not offer enough innovation to highly recommend it if the player already owns previous games in the franchise. If you like lightgun games and really want to try the more raucous sub-machine gun action, it could be worth a look for you.



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