Crisis City (Playstation)

 This is a game I've only got around to trying out fairly recently, and it coincidentally seems to have started to appear on a few other people's radars too (including in the comments of this very blog!). So I thought I'd better cover it before it stops being considered obscure! It's a game that attempts to answer a question I've thought about many times before, and I'm sure a lot of you have too: what if you used polygon characters on pre-rendered backgrounds like in Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, but for an action game? Two whole years before Capcom tried their hand at it with Dino Crisis 2, too!

 

It seems like the developers of Crisis City had a bunch of ideas for how to implement that concept into a game! There's a regular single player mode, in which you select a character and run through stages killing enemies; there's a versus mode where you select a character and fight one of the other characters in a duel (either against the CPU or another player, though unfortunately there's no arcade-style mode for fighting a series of CPU opponents, only individual battles); and a secret extra mode, which seems identical to the first mode, but there must presumably be some difference! (If anyone can figure out what the point of extra mode is, please tell me.)

 

I really wanted to like Crisis City, the concept is really cool, and aesthetically, it really lives up to the potential offered by the concept of "action game with prerendered backgrounds". I love the near-future shiny big city nighttime look and feel of it! There's also some really cool illustrations to look at while the game gives you exposition (unfortunatley in the form of scrolling Japanese text) before you start a story mode game. But beyond the excellent aesthetics is a game that's unfortunately not very fun to play, with a few small problems that all work together to the game's detriment.

 

First, it's just really fiddly. The very first thing to do when you start playing is press X to turn on lock on, as the game's unplayable without it, and even with it on, you have to be stood still and facing an enemy for it to aim at them (as despite what "lock on" sounds like, it's really more of an aiming assist). Of course, the enemies have no problems running around while shooting directly in your direction flawlessly. The second problem, and one that feels bizarrely specific, is that the game really loves putting you in situations where you might get run over by a car. It takes off half of your HP, and it's a car so it's faster than you, too. And it happens so much! Finally, there's a problem that kind of arises from the game's concept (though it could have been fixed with a little more care from the designers): it's sometimes not clear where you're supposed to go or what you're meant to do. 

 

For example, there was one part in the stage that's the first stage for most characters (I guess each character has their own story, so they do things in different orders) where it seems like there's nothing to do after you've killed all of the local enemies. I even died of a time out on one attempt! It turns out that what you've got to do is completely destroy a nearby truck, which takes a lot more ammo than you might expect for something that's both essential and non-hostile, and that clears the path to the next screen. Also you take damage (and lots of it!) if you're stood too close when it explodes, which you probably will be, as since it's not an enemy, you can't lock on to it, and it's not always obvious whether or not your shots are hitting it.

 

So yeah, Crisis City is a game that looks great, and it deserves some respect for trying to pioneer a potentially cool concept (unless there's another game that did it first that I don't know about), but it just doesn't manage to get the execution right. I think you should definitely at least give it a try, just don't go in with high expectations for anything beyond the aesthetics.