The weakest link of the 3-game collection for the PS3 that shares its title, by far, Time Crisis: Razing Storm shows Bamco’s arcade division losing its way. Next to Deadstorm Pirates and Time Crisis 4, Razing Storm comes off as both somehow obnoxious and bland. It’s hard to overstate how dated the whole game feels, from it’s aggressive butt-nu-metal soundtrack to a rah-rah plot in which an American cybersoldier squad invades Brazil to take town a terrorist. That terrorist inexplicably has giant robots and a massive army of brown people to swarm all over the heavily equipped cybersoldiers from the U.S. of A. This would have been racist and off-putting at any time, but reeks of post-911 market-testing and baiting. That the game came out in arcades in 2009 puts it a further 8 years out of date.

Razing Storm also does away with some of the Time Crisis series’ signature mechanics – namely, ducking behind a shield and switching weapons. The shield is still present, but only for reloading. The player is only given other weapons at scripted moments. That’s a backslide even from 90s light gun games like Area 51, in which weapon bonuses were unlocked within levels and at scripted beats. Time Crisis originally innovated on the genre by allowing players to collect different ammo types and switch freely between them, a mechanic present in this collection in Time Crisis 4. I guess I can appreciate Razing Storm for emphasizing how important that mechanic is to the series, because it is incredibly generic without it.