Damn, was it really that bad?
Performance aside, obviously.
It's pretty terrible. Putting aside the terrible controls and performance (at least at the time).
First off, none of the choices you make actually matter, in previous games, choices you made could determine whether someone lives or dies, or whether you escape early, etc. The choices also impacted the relationship between you and the main heroine.
In this game, they do nothing. Aside from a choice at the very end to determine what ending you get, the choices have no impact on the way events play out. You can choose to "Go call for help" as an option, but this isn't actually possible (I assume the game must be unfinished) and you can actually only just move on to the next map, creating a disconnection between the choices you make and the actual outcome, which happens pretty often. There is also no main heroine in the game, so there is no relationship or anything to influence with your decisions. Depending on the choices you make, you can accumulate "good guy" or "bad guy" points (forget what it is actually called), but get this, the points don't actually do anything. If you choose the asshole option, you will get text that says something like, you gained 10 bad guy points. And that's it. A number just goes up.
The disaster report games are well known for having silly dialogue choices, but the games themselves were always serious. If you, as the player character chooses the silly option, people will react to it in an appropriate "what the fuck are you doing" way, you'll lose affection with your partner, etc. In the 4th game, the entire world has gone stupid. It's like they just designed it for youtube streamers to show off funny dialogue options to interest people in the game.
The story is basically non-existent. In previous games, a disaster is ongoing throughout the game (sinking/flooding island for example), and you are typically trying to escape. You hear about a place that might be safe so you go there, only to find out that it's fucked there too, and you keep trying to survive and escape the city, until you finally manage to get out. In this game, the disaster is already over. The protagonist is just wandering aimlessly around the city, basically stumbling upon events. It doesn't make any sense. The game has a small number of maps too, so you will literally be trekking back and forth across the same maps over and over. Half way through the game they are already working on clearing the rubble and shit, and you are still just wandering around map to map. There is never any immediate danger, nothing for the protagonist to escape from, so he has no real reason to travel around the town, but the game still makes you do so.
The characters are all underdeveloped and meaningless, to the point that they had to add DLC for free after the fact showing what happened to these characters. Rather than a main heroine, you spend half the game on your lonesome, and the other half paired up with one of 3? girls, who disappear from the story just as fast as they appear, which kind of makes it hard to give a shit about any of them.
The game feels unfinished and half assed. It has no heart.
If you haven't played any of the games in the series, go play 2. Or 3. Or 1. Hell, I'd even recommend Kyoei Toshi over this game, but I don't think it has an English release.
