Arcade Archives: Crime City (PlayStation 4) review "Vroomless Behavior"

Filled with the STENCH of crime throughout the city, only two men are up to the task of opposing such filth: Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady. A spin-off of Taito's Chase H.Q. vehicular "combat" series, involving bumper car action with driving gameplay inspired by OutRun, Crime City actually ventures into a different genre. Taking control of Tony as player one, with Broady joining in during co-op, you dispense justice on foot with your pistol in this side-scrolling action game.

As you roam the streets in stage one, it doesn't take long to encounter weaponized gangsters appearing from both sides of the screen. More times than not, it only takes a single shot to end them, and they occasionally drop bags of "white substance" that add to your score. But don't get too comfortable, as any projectile damage inflicted on your police officer takes away a life, not to mention your default gun has limited ammo; you'll have to resort to fisticuffs until more ammo is acquired from a dropped foe. There's also opportunities to snatch other temporary weapons, such as a rapid-fire rifle or a shotgun that fires in a three-directional spread.

If you've been playing other side-scrolling action titles in the Arcade Archives collection, then this game's general set-up might sound vaguely familiar. Like what Taito did with Chase H.Q. by borrowing elements from Sega's OutRun, Crime City clearly takes its influence from Namco's Rolling Thunder. From the limited ammunition, to the way you have to accurately shoot enemies hiding behind crates, right down to the weird life bar that only drains if you physically make contact with an enemy, the game makes no effort in hiding what it's copying. The only things missing are the abundance of doors and the constant jumping between two floors.

But hey, if copying OutRun worked for Taito, then why not do the same with Rolling Thunder? Granted, mimicking another product won't automatically make it great, but what's surprising is that it doesn't come near the quality of said game, creating only a tolerable experience. Even with Rolling Thunder's elements, this comes off as a pretty soft side-scrolling title, which is odd for something originating from 1980s arcades. Ranging from gangsters with pistols or criminals with molotov cocktails, to... even more gangsters with pistols, the rogues gallery comes at you with the ferocity of a lost tourist.



If anything, the stage layouts account for the majority of your deaths. You'll climb up and down crates, and often times enemies are placed in intentionally-awkward spots; since your officer can only shoot straightforward while standing, crouching, and jumping this forces an adjustment of tactics depending on elevation. You'll lose several lives on your first playthrough, but due to the game still being on the easy side, about two or three continues total will likely be used if your decent enough. It doesn't help that, unlike Rolling Thunder, your character respawns on the spot after every death. Cranking the difficulty up to Very Hard kinda does something if you squint, but even then there's not a huge disparity between the settings...

Though, the biggest crime committed here is the wasted potential, as Crime City has bouts of ingenuity. Stage two is the greatest example of this: the opening cutscene implies that you'll be thwarting a hostage situation in a bank, but the stage starts with your characters dropping down from a helicopter... into a crowded highway. Here, you have to jump from one speeding vehicle to another while enemies casually sit on them like it's nothing. Afterwards, you're placed inside a parking lot, fending against bikers and cars trying to ram you. There's even portions where you attack criminals shooting from the background, ala Contra! The bank? It's literally the final screen of the stage.



But then the game goes right back into its Diet-Rolling Thunder design of simple shooting and crate-hopping action for the remainder of its single-loop, six stage run. Sometimes you'll nonchalantly dodge crushers in a factory and sometimes you'll shoot at ceiling turrets, but, for some bizarre reason, nothing ever matches the intense variation of stage two. In fact, as a last insult, the sixth final stage simply reuses all the street assets previously seen in stage four; pretty ridiculous to pull off this stunt on, of all places, the climax...

Crime City is an adequate action game, but it was released during the latter half of the 1980s when adequate action games in the arcades were the norm. So when you prop it up into a spotlight, decades later, in something like the Arcade Archives catalog, it's much easier to see it for what it really is: a game that plays it too safe while borrowing aspects from another well-known, better-executed game. If you want something that has co-op action and doesn't stand out in nearly every regard outside of Zuntata's eccentric soundtrack, then go for Crime City, otherwise just play Rolling Thunder.

Community review by dementedhut (February 23, 2025) Hocus pocus.