The filling in this gun-game sandwich is
Time Crisis 4. It's a game that fans of the genre will be familiar with, either from the arcades, or since it was released as a standalone PS3 game in 2008. It's classic
Time Crisis, and my favourite game in this disk. The heroes look as if they come from
Devil May Cry or
Bayonetta - steampunk dandy duellists. The game starts in an airport, which for some reason seems apposite and traditional for a
Time Crisis game, and it quickly advances in to a counter terrorist plot that is as fanciful as it is irrelevant.
At its core, this is classic
Time Crisis: keep pumping lead into your opponents, avoid getting shot or hit with the many thrown knives, axes etc and keep pushing on. The arcade game nature is obvious, in that dying casts you back to the start. The repetition may drive some insane, but if it wasn't there, you'd finish the game within an hour of first picking it up. If you are anything like me, dropping enemy troops with well timed headshots never grows old, and there's always your score and accuracy to work on.
The supposed jewel in this package's crown is
Time Crisis Razing Storm, of course. It's an important game for the
Time Crisis franchise, because it's the first game in the series to derail you. That is,
Time Crisis in the past has always been a gun game with gun controllers had no real directional controls. You had to be propelled through the game-world on a timed or incident driven schedule - you killed all the attackers in a certain area, and you'd be wheeled on to the next.
But now the PS3 has the Move, and Move has its accompanying Navigation controller (a Wii Nunchuk controller in all but name). In story mode at least,
Razing Storm lets you hold this in your non-gun hand and use it to navigate the level in your own time. It's a paradigm shift for
Time Crisis, and it's a genre shift too because the resulting game is Move's first first-person shooter.
Whether you consider that a good thing is down to your own gaming preferences. If you do think it's a good thing, you may still find the control method takes some getting used to. The direction of your gun barrel controls your direction AND the direction you are looking in, the Nunchuk controls the direction you walk in.
This may turn out to be the way all Move FPSs are controlled, but at first (unless you've played the Wii's handful of FPSes) it's a bit of a shock to the system.
All this is also combined with
Time Crisis' traditional cover method.
When you come to any obstacle that you can hide behind, pointing the gun off the top of the screen will see you duck behind cover. Pointing back onto screen will pull you out of cover. The thing is, with the old system - using a button for cover - when you let it go, your bead was back on target. Now, that's not the case so you have to hunt for a target while you are exposed to enemy fire.
