Parent's Guide: Crash Time 4: The Syndicate - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Alarm Für Cobra 11 sees your child stepping into the shoes of an autobahn policeman, striving to keep their city of Cologne from falling into the hands of a bunch of bad eggs known as the Syndicate. To do this, it's up to you to scour the city streets, building up a network of communications and CCTV by pulling up in certain points, and rumbling their hideouts, in order to locate, corner and capture each member of the group, with all the high octane chases, large explosions, and vehicular based mayhem you might expect.

Unfortunately, the game isn't terribly good at explaining how you go about doing all this, and so your child may well get frustrated when they initially pick things up. Learning where to go, what to do and which buttons to press at the start of the game can be confusing for adults, yet alone younger children. Once they've got over the initial hurdle, though, and can understand what to do (possibly with your assistance), Crash Time 4 is a game that certainly plays itself up to kids, through the sheer ridiculousness and over the top nature of the crashes you can, and are actually asked, to get yourself into, as you attempt to take the Syndicate down.

While it may feature plenty of crashes, Crash Time 4 is light on mature content, with nothing in the way of sex, swearing or true violence. While Alarm Fur Cobra 11 (the TV show Crash Time is based on) has the occasional bit of fairly bad language, the worst you're likely to hear in Crash Time 4 is a "damn" every now and then. Similarly, any violence is also of the incredibly mild, vehicle-on-vehicle variety, as there are no pedestrians around, you can't leave your cars, and you can't shoot the drivers of other vehicles. There's no blood, no "ouch!" sound, they just turn a blind eye.

Obviously, the main thing parents will want to be aware of with Crash Time 4 is the amount of spectacular crashes you can, and will, cause during your career with the autobahn police. Hit another vehicle on the road fast enough and it'll explode into a smouldering wreckage, although, strangely, there'll be no driver (or any passengers) in the wreck.

With a four-player local multiplayer mode that sees you racing against the rest of your family, Crash Time 4 is great fun as a party-style multiplayer game. Races have a vast number of customisation options, allowing you to set things like traffic density and whether or not your vehicles are invincible as well as the usual things like numbers of laps and the like. Unfortunately, Crash Time 4's best multiplayer mode, the Sumo mode, which gets you to push your opponents off the top of a tall building whilst trying to avoid the same happening to yourself, is online only, something that we hope Synetic will rectify come Crash Time 5.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360