 |
 |
|
| If this was Hollywood wouldn’t the diesel have exploded already? | Lots of fire, not much smoke. Hopefully the firefighters notice it there |
The heart of Emergency 3 is based on the idea that it’s fun to be the first response to a variety of emergency situations. These include, but are not limited to, bungee cord failures, fires, auto accidents, explosions, fires, train wrecks and tanker roll overs. Your job is to properly analyze the situation and send out the right kind of response to bring the situation to a proper close. What is a proper close is defined as depends on the level as each level comes with specific objectives to complete and requirements as to which units must be utilized in your completion.
There isn’t really any over arcing storyline to Emergency 3. It’s simply one big town with a lot of problems. If the problems get solved everyone goes home happy, if not entirely in one piece. There are twenty levels of gameplay or a free play option, but after the first few the general patterns are set and don’t change much no matter how you choose to address the game. The set levels take a lot of trial and error to get right, and I think I killed more people than I saved if I add it all up. To their credit, these levels are introduced well with a rendered scene that gives you all the required information and some of the situations take place in interesting locations, but if you miss one of the steps in the predetermined set up you’ll find yourself playing the interesting locations over and over until they’re not very interesting anymore.
Free play just means the problems keep coming and coming and coming. Like Mister Incredible you may quickly find yourself wondering if the city can’t be saved and just stay that way for a minute or two, but remember you opted to play the game. Don’t forget while you’re responding to all these problems you must also keep your budget in check or you’ll end up failing your objective as well.
The gameplay involved in Emergency 3 is fairly formulaic once you figure out the general patterns. This repetition is a problem, but worse is figuring out the patterns in the first place. No explanation or tutorial exists for showing what each of your 30 different rescue units does. So, while it’s neat to have the sheer variety, it’s painfully easy to choose poorly and send the wrong units to the rescue. This leads to watching your would be rescued victims bleed to death while you’re trying to figure out why the unit you sent has no idea what they’re doing. The text that accompanies each unit isn’t really helpful as it only pops up once the mission is started and the wording leaves much to be desired.
 |
 |
|
| The flare of the lights isn’t a great effect, since it makes all vehicles…blue | Fortunately the home owner is smart enough to just stand there in another room. Cause..ya know…the fire is never coming that direction |
Once you figure out which units do what the actual control of the units is a pain as they must be sent out one at a time and controlled individually. Sometimes units are smart enough to follow your right clicked directions and can be left to their own devices. Other times they get distracted somewhere along the way and your fire truck is suddenly responding to the river while a nearby factory merrily burns. The idea of having a cursor that changes shape on mouse over isn’t new, but in the case of Emergency 3 should have been left out. Pixel hunting to get the right interaction at the right time only increases the frustration when you’re firefighters, who finally made it to the fire, still aren’t –fighting- the fire. The lack of AI for your units is nothing compared to the AI work on the bystanders, who enjoy making themselves into more victims. I swear every pixilated character in the game has a suicide missive. On one really morbid hand it’s kind of funny to watch rubberneckers get run over in traffic, but hardly helpful to winning the game.
Graphically the game is adequate with a few nice features. The units are all distinct, so generally clicking on the wrong type of unit isn’t a case of graphically mistaken identity, and you can rotate the map for a better angle on the action, which was nice. However there is nothing about the game that is graphically new or really attractive either. Adequate really does seem to be the keyword. It’s enough to get the game across, but not necessarily anything I can call pretty.
By about the half way point I wanted to kill the sound on this game. Not that there wasn’t a lot of it, but that was exactly the point. Moans, sirens, groans, sirens, unit commentary, sirens, and did I mention sirens? As a game based on emergency situations some siren action is expected, but there needed to be a way to shut it off at some point because the blaring sirens got tiring and headache inducing at a certain point. If there was much other soundtrack to the game I never noticed it due to the sound effects.
If you grow tired of the scenarios already in the game there is a provision for creating your own, but it’s not for the faint of heart. The interface is rather complex and definitely not for the casual player.
 |
 |
|
| Fire fighters at work! And bystanders in the road | Okay, I admit this is a cool effect and was a fun scenario |
Despite everything Emergency 3 isn’t a completely bad game. There are some interesting moments, and I did enjoy the variety of rescue scenarios once I started to get a handle on things. The problem is that as much as it wasn’t a bad game it wasn’t a great game either, falling somewhere in the realm of mediocre. Then again…so is most reality TV.
Top Gaming moment:
TOP GAME MOMENT
I did like the variety of possible rescues, the forest fire with the water drops from the plane was particularly fun.
