For my money, the second best of the Time Crisis series. It's more of the original, with all of its mechanics and visual presentation intact. The original time system is back, the combo system is back, the low-poly models with a focus on primary color-clad enemies is back. It's wonderful.

This game has limited credits with no free play mode (I think it's the only TC game without one?), so you'll be in for a challenge learning its levels and enemies until you're good enough to beat it within your set number of continues. I had a hell of a good time doing it. Unlike the other TCs, I couldn't fall back on a free play mode—for once I had to just, well, get better. And I exited my playthrough of Project Titan a way better player of Time Crisis than I entered.

If you're a Time Crisis fan, you've likely been curious about this strange 2001 PS1 "sequel". Arriving a mere six months before Time Crisis 2's PS2 conversion, it's one of the most baffling games I've encountered.

Project Titan comes to us from Flying Tiger Entertainment, who are mainly a porting house. The only other original titles I can source to them appear to be No Rules: Get Phat for the GBA and the PC King of the Hill CD-ROM "game". After over a decade occupied solely with mobile games, they have recently been tasked with porting Data East arcade games to the Switch eShop, where they're stretched to widescreen and presented with mandatory pixel smoothing. Look, I know the games industry is a harsh and often unfulfilling place, and anyone who decides to make games for us to enjoy ought to have our encouragement, but I'm just trying to present an accurate picture of who these people are, and why it's so bizarre that Namco would offer them the rights to one of their headline franchises at its peak. This is like if they gave Tekken 3 to Titus Interactive.

Rest assured, Project Titan is far and away the best thing Flying Tiger have ever made. Yes, reader, this is weak praise.

I really don't know how or why this game happened. My best guess is that Namco had produced too many G-Con 45s, and weren't confident that they could rely on Rescue Shot and Ghoul Panic to shift units. Project Titan does try to disguise itself as a proper Time Crisis game. We're still playing as Richard Miller, and both Wild Dog and the console-only villain, Kantaris, both return to antagonise us. Character models appear to be higher poly than TC1, with more detailed textures, but still end up looking a little cruder, lacking the original artists' skill and insight. They're post-2000 American PS1 characters cosplaying as classic Namco characters. The game's tone attempts something goofier than the more earnest original, but lacks the charm to make it palatable. The first mid-level sub-boss is an outrageous French chef who throws butcher knives at you. Standard enemies now appear in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. The original game's brilliant sunset framing device is gone, and the pressing nature of this "time crisis" takes a backseat as Richard indulges in international flights and hails a taxi. You don't even get a shoot-out in the taxi either, as this team clearly isn't up to the task of presenting a 3D highway chase.

The actual Time Crisising is mostly fair. The original game's design is replicated quite faithfully, with colour coded enemies, moving obstacles and elaborate action on each new potshot position. The game does tend to hang in one spot a little too long, with some mandatory enemies appearing a little too distant. The environments lack the Castle of Cagliostro romanticism of the original, taking place in relatively dour locations like a cruise liner and an airport. The fact that this is so heavily inspired by the original Time Crisis prevents it from doing some of the things I dislike about the sequels, like using bulletsponge enemies and wacky, kinetic chase sequences. There's also an on-screen combo indicator, tracking each time you successfully fired at an enemy without wasting a bullet, and rewarding you with health if you manage an unbroken chain of 30 hits, but that just plainly isn't going to happen without fully memorising this fairly middling game.

The biggest mark against the game is when it tries to be clever. It introduces an original mechanic. Please do not do this, Flying Tiger Entertainment. Data East are waiting for you to make a terrible eShop port of Atomic Runner Chelnov. Go talk to them.

There's a few bosses where Flying Tiger plays their ace card. You have to shift your cover position by shooting a big on-screen arrow while ducking. They'll appear just out of frame, and Richard will need to run through the hail of gunfire to position himself behind a barrier, two feet to the right. It's crap, disjointed, and introduces a bunch of enemies to fire at whatever's in front of them, with little regard over whether there's a target there or not. There's a big tank boss thing, and you have to shoot canisters on either side of it and one on its back. It'll shift depending on which of the five positions you're sitting behind. You have to fake it out by quickly shifting from the rightmost position to the leftmost to reveal its weakpoints. The armour piercing bullets and anti-aircraft cannon doing nothing to Richard as he runs from pillar to pillar. The tank's design is pretty bad, too, and I had to look up a Let's Play to discover it had a weakpoint on its back.

Project Titan isn't terrible, but it isn't Time Crisis either. The game feels thoroughly inauthentic. It's a fangame, stripping voice clips and sound effects from the original, and slotting them within a campaign that doesn't match its tone. You also have to play the whole thing again on Normal Mode if you want to get the last level, and that kind of thing can fuck right off. There's no good reason to play this over Time Crisis 1, 2 or 3 (though you can rightfully call it a day before dipping into 4 or Crisis Zone). I make no apologies for my veneration of Time Crisis 1, but I've attempted to put that to the side as I've presented this game to you as objectively as I can. Privately, I've been calling it Project Shitean.