Crash Time 4: The Syndicate

As per my Crash Time 5 review, I played Crash Time 4 out of sequence order due to online multiplayer and taking the opportunity to get them done when it arose. These two games highlight exactly why if you want to see if a series is good, you should only get the first game and buy the others if you like it. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with Crash Time 4 but it was better than 5, though that’s not saying much.

Crash Time 4 follows the story of Ben and Semir as they attempt to take down The Syndicate, a bunch of supposed criminals who never get out of their cars, spend all their time driving around the city and park in strange locations. Seriously, other than the police telling you they have committed crimes, there is no proof that these guys do anything more than speed and commit the occasional parking offense.

My biggest problems with game revolve around the gameplay elements. It’s better than Crash Time 5 in many ways – you have a semi-open world to explore which means the story is less linear, but you are made to do the same things over and over again. My bigger gripe with this is the police radio you have and how needy every other fucker on the force is. You will be contacted asking for help a disproportionate amount of times even when you are on your own missions. What’s annoying about this is that if you accidently accept an incoming cry for help – easily done by pressing the wrong button – you will abandon your current objective and be criticised for doing so!

The main part of the game is arresting all of the members of The Syndicate. To do this, you have to pull them over to take them into police custody but to actually arrest them, you then have to do an escort mission to take them from the police station to the jail. You can escort a maximum of three Syndicate members at a time and if you catch too many at once, they will either escape (how?!) or get let out because you don’t have enough evidence to hold them (despite the filmed majorly destructive intercity car chase catching them in the first place).

Here is an average 10 minutes of gameplay doing a police transport mission:

1. Start driving a police transport mission.

2. Radio goes off informing you of a stolen car. This gives the option of abandoning the police transport mission. You ignore it.

3. Radio goes off highlighting suspicious location. You ignore it and carry on with the mission.

4. Radio goes off telling you that the stadium has been bombed (for the fifth time today, I might add) and that some Americans are there. All squad cars report. You ignore this because it’s the fifth time it’s happened in the last hour so there can’t actually be a stadium left.

5. You start wondering why you haven’t arrived at the destination yet. It is always the same destination so why does it take a disproportionate amount of time to get there? It varies from mission to mission to get from the same place to the same place.

6. You will be attacked by two criminals who you can arrest by stopping them.

7. You arrive at your destination. None of the problems that happened on the way there are relevant but you have another two people you have arrested that need to be taken to prison.

8. Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Steps 1 to 7 comprises about 60% of the game. Another 30% is putting up surveillance cameras and driving to supposed criminal hideouts (which are illegal parking spots at worst and private garages at best) and the remaining 10% is doing the actual in game missions. Sadly, the only way to complete the final few missions (of which there are 5 total) involves getting to around 80% completion. So you will have to do a lot of escorting and camera-putting-up to do just to complete the main game.

The most annoying thing out of the above though, is the fact that the radio keeps giving you new shit to do but will make you quit your current objective. Pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make you quit your objective without any ‘are you sure’ prompt which is fucking annoying but there you go. It only happened to me twice though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 39 Achievements

Shitty gameplay aside, there are still achievements here so let’s get this over with. There are 5 achievements for the main storyline and you’re bound to notch up most of the situational achievements along the way. There is one exception to this and that is the game’s one missable achievement. You have to take out 10 of your opponents and this is harder than it sounds because it is so easy to simply pull people over using the pit manoeuvre.  To take them out, you have to damage them enough to stop them and this is made difficult by the fact that you car takes damage when you are damaging the bad guys. Thankfully 10 isn’t too long-winded a number to get to but if you do what I did and target this at the start, once you’ve done it, the rest of the game flies by.

After getting all of the situational achievements and beating the main game, including setting up all cameras and getting 100%, you will still have a few things left to do. All of which involve driving for a long time. Makes sense as it’s a driving game right? A lot of the stuff has just been copied across to Crash Time 5 like drive on all tracks, drive all cars and drive 1,000 miles but Crash Time 4 drags it out a lot more.

You have to win 50 single races and in order to unlock all the cars in the first place. You have to complete loads of ‘championships’ in career mode because these cops take part in illegal street races during their down time apparently. Once you’ve done all this, there will still be 2 achievements left – for racing 30 laps each around two different courses. You will have already covered 1,000 km by this point so these achievements are totally unnecessary. The last one I got was for doing an off-road course with pebbles that if you slightly touch them, will send your car flying into the sky. It takes between 45 minutes to an hour to do just one of these two – so basically an additional hour and a half of boring gameplay if you want the 100%.

Multiplayer

There are 9 achievements for online play compared to the three on from Crash Time 5, which suggests that these guys realised that online for these games is a bag of wank. For Crash Time 4, you have to play in three different modes. You have to win 20 deathmatches including one without dying - easy if you set the kill count to one. You also have to win 20 checkpoint races and 20 normal races. I boosted this with someone else and it takes about 5 hours with two people trading wins. To be fair, 20 is a nice number compared to some of the others in online gaming but I still find this stuff unnecessary.

Downloadable – N/A

Crash Time 4 was missing some of the humour from its successor which is disappointing because it’s not strong enough to take itself seriously. The arcade racing style is forgiving which makes it playable but it’s not massively fun.