The scene is a four car pileup on one of the city's
busiest highways. A police officer guides traffic through the
scene, medics are tending to the many casualties found around
the area, firefighters attempt to put out a fire that has started
after one of the cars exploded, and working crews are standing
by waiting to clear the wreckage once everything is within control.
What are you doing? You're monitoring their every move. Your
the commanding chief of all emergency crews, and your job is
to make sure everything runs smoothly. That's the concept
behind TopWare's latest game entitled Emergency: Fighters for
Life. This real time strategy pits you as the head honcho of
every emergency crew in the city, and your job is to handle
every emergency situation in a calm and orderly fashion.
The object of the game is simple: send out crews to
various emergency situations and ensure the safety of
everybody involved. The game starts off by giving you a set
number of emergency crews (police personnel, medical
personnel, firefighters, etc.) Your job is to receive emergency
situations, and assign objectives to each of your different
crews. As you successfully complete each mission, your given
more funding so that you can purchase more units, more
bases, etc. so that you can carry out further missions in a more
effective manner. The missions include a variety of situations
such as highway accidents, nuclear plant disasters, fires, and
much more. You're given mission objectives for each situation
as well, which you must follow in order to complete them.
The actual missions themselves play out in real time,
so you can't lag behind in your objectives. You'll have to load
up your vehicles, send them out to the scene, give your men
specific orders and carry them out in an orderly fashion. All of
this is done using the mouse. Inside your base, you'll have to
click on your different personnel to load them into the truck,
and so forth. When you arrive at the scene, you must
disembark your personnel and instruct them as to what they
should do. Unfortunately, the game becomes fairly repetitive in
this respect. Although the situations are diverse, the commands
you can give your troops aren't. One mistake, and you'll have to
restart the mission, and it simply boils down to finding the right
combination of commands it will take to complete the mission.
In this respect, there isn't a great deal of strategy to the game.
Replay value is also cut extremely short by this as well. Once
you complete a mission, you can never play it a second time,
because it will play out the same way every time. If some
aspects of the missions were generated randomly, it would
have added a great deal of replay value to the game.
A nice feature in the game is the fact that you must
use resources. You have a certain amount of money to work
with, so you can't be too frivolous when it comes to sending
out units. You can certainly send out a half dozen ambulances
to the scene, but then you might not have enough fire trucks,
and so forth. Another important issue to keep in mind is the
different emergency bases you control around the city.
Accidents will occur in certain parts of the city, and if you don't
have a base nearby, that extra travel time could work against
you. In this respect, I suppose there is some strategy to the
game, but once you arrive on the scene, all strategy is thrown
out the window.
The graphics in Emergency are rather simple and
uninspiring. There is no 3DFX support, so there isn't a great
amount of detail in the units, backgrounds or any of the
terrains. Its all basic pixels, and colors aren't extremely varied
either. The pyrotechnics are rather bland and all in all, the
graphics department could have been better. However, for a
real time strategy game, the graphics aren't poor either. They
weren't unpleasant to look at, just uninspiring.
It certainly is quiet on the job. The sound is kept to a
minimum in the game, with only some special effects to be
heard. Like in most real time strategies, when you click on a
vehicle or a unit, you'll get the obligatory "Yes Sir", "Right
away Sir" type speech, but not much else outside of that. You will
also hear several special effects ranging from emergency
sirens, to people's voices as they writhe in pain on the ground.
There is no music to be heard, and very little speech. It would
have been a nice touch to have some kind of background
music for the times when you aren't at the scene of an
accident.
This title sports no multiplayer functions as you can
well imagine. It would be hard to implement that into this
particular title. Its clearly just a single player game, and
nothing more. The controls of the game are fairly simple, all of
which are used through the mouse. Loading up personnel,
unloading personnel, giving orders, moving around on the
map; are all done using the mouse. One area I couldn't
understand was the fact that you can actually send out a
vehicle to the scene of an accident, without any crew on
board. I suppose that's a bug in the game, so when you click
on a vehicle to start with, remember that even though you can
move it somewhere, it doesn't mean anybody is inside.
All in all, this game was a unique experience, but
wasn't memorable. It boils down to being a simple real time
strategy game with a new concept, but with out dated
graphics, sound, and lacking in strategy when it counts.
Graphics: 10 / 20
Sound: 7 / 15
Gameplay: 16 / 25
Fun Factor: 9 / 20
Multiplayer Play: 0 / 5
Packaging: 3 / 5
Overall Impression: 5 / 10
Overall Rating: 50 / 100