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Once upon a time, many moons ago, I lived on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan. During my two year stint in the land of the rising sun, teaching English and writing about Japan's favourite pastime, I spent an unhealthy amount of time, and a bank manager enraging amount of money, in the arcades.

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• game info

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  • Publisher:

    Sony

    Developer:

    Unknown

    Release Date:

    Q4 2007

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Compared to their western counterparts, Japanese arcades are a veritable joy - a mecca of noisy, garish pleasures; a sensory overload - not just because of the games, but also the crowds of teens and young adults that inhabit them.

Simple pleasures are the aim of the game in these places, and games like Time Crisis prove incredibly alluring. Taken in the right context, light-gun, on-rails shooting proves just the ticket for a few minutes of intense fun. Kiss goodbye to those 100 Yen coins. In the lounge, however, and without the quick thrill-excitement of the arcade, these titles have always been a bit hit and miss, and its little surprise that despite Namco's attempts to reinvent Time Crisis on the PS3 - this is a game that for me really is best consigned to a certain time and a certain place.

For starters, the light gun bundled with this new release is a hideous shade of orange, and the fiddly infrared receivers you need to dangle on top of your television, aren't always as sensitive as you might hope. The fact that the gun is wired to the PS3 via USB is also something of a bummer, the whole kit leaving a mash of cables trailing from your suddenly slightly less zen games console.

Initially, the visuals are pretty impressive, and are certainly an HD-shaped step in the right direction when compared to past Time Crisis releases. That said, our new heroes we're introduced to are frankly laughable. Giorgio Bruno and Evan Bernard are so ridiculous that I actually found myself not caring when they died. They also have very stupid hair.

This leads me onto the plot, such as it is. Of course, this being a light-hearted blaster, Namco can be forgiven for not delivering BioShock, or The Great Gatsby, but really. Anti-terrorist special forces double act? Black market bio-weapons? Swarming 'Terror Bites' that we'll have to dispatch again and again again? Is this really the rebirth Namco promised us? The first stage is even set in an airport dammit.

The light-gun is also embellished with what seems like enough buttons to pilot the Death Star. Yes, you'll need a few of them; for shooting, ducking, switching weapons, but ultimately what we've been given is an unnecessarily fussy tool for the job in hand. The action, retrograde though it may be, can be intense at times, and while the enemies are sluggish and poor at aiming for the most part, the fire-fights can be intense enough to raise the heartbeat. Your foes certainly won't be entering MENSA anytime soon, needless to say.

Variety between the stages is reasonable, and occasionally you'll actually have to take a little control over the direction of your hero, as well as your aiming - but never fear, things never get overly brain-taxing, and there are plenty of very on-rail moments, which can actually be the most fun, such as when you're in the helicopter.

There is a spot of innovation in the form of the FPS-inspired Complete Mission mode, which sees you using the gun's extra 'stick' to move freely in the game's environments, but this only serves to highlight how far behind proper next-gen shooters Time Crisis 4 is. A split-screen mode should help squeeze a little more pleasure out of the game, once the short and somewhat easy story mode is despatched, but its unlikely you won't have got fed up with the average controls and less-than-stellar presentation by this point.

For committed (good one - Ed) fans of this rather niche genre, Time Crisis 4 might appeal, and it does offer flashes of high-quality entertainment, but frankly most of what Namco have delivered is largely uninspired, and the GunCon 3 controller is certainly no mould-breaker. In conclusion, TC4 proves that some things are better left in the arcade, in Japan, in the past.

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