Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9490 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Take 2
• Released on: 2005-03-18
• Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Customer Reviews

Strangely addictive and certainly unique
As the title suggests, this is a strangely addictive game. I wasn't sure whether I would enjoy rescuing people from car wreckages or firefighting burning buildings - after all, it seems somewhat gruesome. However, I set it on easy mode and settled myself down for a trial. I confess to having played for 8 hours (breaking for lunch only) before realising my whole day had disappeared.

The bonus it has is that every mission seems to have a new little twist, something to keep you on your toes. And if you complete the mission, the challenge is then to improve your efficiency or to play a harder level. The missions are varied and interesting. And if you do tire of the missions there are two "freeplay" modes with various challenges to keep you occupied.

It's definitely not for young children. But computer-game playing fans of TV police, hospital and fire dramas will possibly find it appealing. If you like strategy games with set goals and aims, I think you would also enjoy it.

As for gameplay length, it really depends on how much of a perfectionist you are or how bored you become with endless emergency challenges. But I suspect most people will get quite a lot out of this, making it pretty good value.

AMAZING!!
I played this game as a demo but it was in german. The demo was great, but i didn't know what anything ment! So i bought the game and i was highly impressed. First of all, if you have a really quick computer with an nvidia geforce graphics card, the game will look highly realistic. It has a campain mode which shows you a little video at the begining of each level. It also has a freeplay mode which is one of the best parts of the game. It has two modes, "Challenge" mode and the "Never Ending" mode. In the "challenge" mode you must look alfter a city by sending the correct people to the correct place. You must not let the situations get out of control, or you will fail! In the "Never Ending" mode it is the same as the "Challenge" mode but it dosen't matter if the situation gets out of control. Also you can literaly play it for ever!

You can get about every emergency vehicle you can think of, from police cars, speed boats, helicopters, to ships, cranes and planes.

This game is amazing and i highly recommend you buy it.
P.S.(if you were wondering, this game is in english!)

An RTS, with extra blue lights
I never played either of the previous games in this series, and in fact only stumbled across it whilst looking for something else on Amazon. However, although it's a game by a relatively obscure company (or at least one I'd never heard of), the reviews I saw seemed to be, if not good, not completely bad.

Actually the game's quite good fun. The player takes charge of the emergency services (fire, police, ambulance and technical services) for a small city. The challenge is to deploy the appropriate units and give the correct instructions in the proper sequence in order to deal with each incident. Incidents can range from car accidents through thefts and spontaneous medical crises to radioactive disasters and hostage situations. A wide range of vehicles and staff are on hand to contain, resolve and clean up after each incident, but it's up to you to analyse each job and decide what's going to be required and when.

So, for example, at the scene of a road accident, you might first deploy police officers to divert traffic and secure the crash scene. Then it's up to the fire service to cut the trapped victim out of the car, and then paramedics and emergency doctors can get to work, before loading the casualty into the ambulance and taking them back to base for treatment. Then over to the fire service again, who can arrange recovery of the damaged vehicle, and once all that's done, the police can resume back to base.

Sounds straightforward enough. And there're plenty of variations. You've got medical helicopters to retrieve casualties from those hard-to-reach places. There're armed response teams to deal with the occasional gun-toting madman. Or divers for when someone's fallen in the water. Everything's here, in fact, and dealing with each discrete incident is pretty enjoyable.

Graphically, the game's reminiscent of something like SimCity. It's an isometric map, which fortunately can be rotated, so no-one's going to get permanently lost behind buildings or trees. However, the controls aren't fantastic, and the map can be awkward to operate, especially in the heat of an incident when you're trying to co-ordinate a number of units at once. Incidents that involve a moving target - such as car thefts and shoplifting - can be difficult for this reason, since in order to deploy each unit you must first select and activate it, then pan the view over to the base where the unit is waiting for orders, select it, then pan the map back to the scene of the crime, by which time the offender has probably run off. Had the developers thought to auto-select newly-activated units so that they could be deployed straight to the scene, this particular issue would not have arisen.

And that, sadly, isn't the only gripe to taint this otherwise highly enjoyable game. The sound effects consist almost solely of European-style sirens, and injured people groaning. Turning them off, strangely, leaves some sound on - but this is ambient background and isn't quite so annoying.

Although unit pathfinding is pretty solid, the artificial 'intelligence' controlling bystanders is actually a study in stupidity. Show them a fire, and they'll walk cheerfully into it and burn, meaning that a simple fire becomes a major rescue operation. Show them a gun-wielding maniac and they'll wander up and try to engage him in conversation. And I'm not done. The game scores a bucketload of points in my book by having a free-play mode in addition to its linear, 20-mission structure. This is a 'never-ending game', where randomly-generated incidents crop up around town and you can play on and on for as long as you like. Sometimes it's busy, other times you'll be snarling at the game to do something. And, inevitably, sooner or later there will be a fire. In my experience, once there's a fire your game is essentially over. Fire spreads at an astonishing rate, feeding itself and racking up first tens, then hundreds of casualties, blowing up whole queues of cars like scary exploding dominoes, and generally reducing your city to rubble in the time it takes you to deploy a single fire engine. Even if you manage to douse the inferno - and I've never managed it yet - the clean-up task will be Herculean; most of the casualties will have died; and by the time you really get started, another fire's cropped up somewhere else and the whole thing starts again.

It's true that the game is trying to model, to some extent, the demands and stress of emergency service resource management. But it is, after all, just a game. Some measure of control over what type of incidents occur, or how frequently, or how many can be in progress at once, would not have been realistic, but in my view would have made the free-play option far more enjoyable. As it is, this game is a very competent attempt at an unusual subject, but has just enough flaws and annoyances to prevent it being great.