Standby....ACTION! Now with CO OP!

This game is probably my favorite Time Crisis in the numbered series. I remember beating it at a immigration lawyers office as a kid LOL. Fun times to be had and even strangers helped me with with co-op mechnaic. Playing it on PS2 has its charm compared to its arcade counterpart. Replay Value is insane! You can always play a different angle cause of its Co-op partner. Solid Gameplay loop and story is easy to understand with all the action from a blockbuster movie! Do not sleep on this GOAT On-rail shooter game.

I reckon Time Crisis II has become the gold standard lightgun game in most folk's view. It's easy to enjoy. Richard Miller is gone, and supplanted by two cocky sports coat owners, Robert Baxter and Keith Martin. When confronted by the prospect of a terrorist group launching nuclear weapons, they retort with a "I don't think so!" and race across international waters to see how quickly they can shoot two-hundred men dead.

The technological leap from the original game allows TC2 to do really have fun with its scenarios. Shooting and ducking behind cascading barrels, chasing a boss in a speedboat, and having an intense shoot-out on two parallel trains. It's whizzy and daft.

The big feature of Time Crisis II is that it adapts Time Crisis into a two-player game, like any attractive lightgun cabinet would be. Time Crisis' mechanics meant that each player needs to have their own screen. It's not the traditional lightgun shooting gallery. It's quite a difficult thing to do in a home conversion, as it has to maintain a 4:3 ratio for both players, and unless you've got a massive CRT, you're going to end up with a screen the size of a smartphone. Thankfully, the PS2 version features i.Link support, allowing you to hook up two PS2s to two 4:3 CRTs and have each player use full screens. I don't see myself ever being able to play this mode, especially since PS2s made after 2002 or so dropped the i.Link port.

Even if you're just playing in one-player, the scenario is tailored towards two characters, each taking slightly different routes through the levels. If an enemy is pinning your partner down, you might be able to hit them and help out. If you plug your gun into the other port, you can play the slightly-different Player 2 scenario, which does add some replay value if the Player 1 route is starting to feel a little overfamiliar.

Time Crisis II is fun, but I feel the high-flying, dip-and-diving nature of the game makes it feel less solid than the original. Most the game is still about placing you behind cover and finding opportunities to pop up and dispatch as many baddies as you can, but the big, moving setpieces kind of diminish that for me. The couple instances where you're given a rapidfire weapon, and just hold the trigger down until a big target explodes, is the start of a slippery slope into inconsequential airyfairy nonsense that the further sequels would languish in. But it's fun. It breaks up the pace. I guess that's what casual arcade-goers approaching a Time Crisis cabinet would be excited by.

If this is the standard lightgun game for most folk, they could do a hell of a lot worse. I do enjoy the nonsense. Wild Dog's return (first of many) and ducking as a big galoot swings a nuclear missile at your face. It's a fairly robust PS2 disc too, with extra training modes, unlockables, and a wildly impractical dual-wielding mode that was the stuff of my childhood dreams. I'm honest to god recommending this, and calling it a 9/10. It's very hard for me to talk about anything for a while and not mention how much I love Time Crisis 1, though.

Maybe controversial, but I think I'm not as hot on this one as most. I think the change to the scoring and combo system is for the worse—I prefer TC1's more punishing time limits—and for as propulsive and exciting as the setpieces can be in TC2, it all feels like a half step to TC3's full realization. You get some weapon variety here, but it's more a stepping stone to 3's full weapon changing system.

TC2 just represents a half step toward more complexity, but not far enough to really pull me in as its own unique take on the series. The only thing holding it back is really that feeling that it's stuck between the worlds of TC1 and 3 in terms of design.

Crisis Mission Mode, where you perform a series of short shooting gallery challenges, is a fun addition that extends replay value, but it's got nothing on TC1's full blown original campaign on PS1.

Still a must play for any fans of the series or the genre. All the strengths of the original are mostly still here.

Definitely my favorite light gun game.

It improves upon the first time crisis in every way, It has an awesome aesthetic, new mechanics, great co-op play, great set pieces, a fucking train level, Memorable boss fights. It is just pure arcade awesomeness. The game is fun from start to finish.

Play it however you can.

Twice the action, twice the guns, twice the arcade cabinet size, and TWICE THE PLAYERS! Time Crisis II might be one of the most literal translations when Namco gave this crew the objective "make the second Time Crisis game" as it evolved its gameplay and expanded the horizon in order to make the game big enough for two players (I bet selling those gigantic cabinets to arcades and movie theaters gave Namco a nice chunk of change too).

There's something I inherently adore about the "lone wolf" setting the original Time Crisis had, something the mainline games would never return to. So I can't help but love the original game just a tad bit more. Still, this game is awesome and feels a bit more fair with how they design the enemy attacks, giving you a decent warning to react in order to avoid getting hurt! Time Crisis II is an appropriate step-up from the original experience in the ways that really matter the most.