Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6838 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Agetec
• Released on: 2003-03-07
• Platform: PlayStation2

Amazon.co.uk Review
SOS: The Final Escape puts you in control of a journalist on his first day working on a newly built man-made island. Predictably enough, things go wrong early on in this RPG platformer: earthquakes are destroying the city and the island is slowly sinking. The bridge leading to the island collapses leaving you precariously balanced on top of a twisted pile of concrete and steel. Jumping and climbing your way off leads to the dubious safety of the city.

Periodically, tremors endeavour to knock you off your feet (combated by use of the brace button) and cause buildings to collapse, conveniently forming platforms to be used to traverse the shattered landscape. As you progress, shopping malls, skyscrapers and baseball stadiums come crashing down around you resulting in either careful exploration or mad dashes for safety. The pace and gameplay varies later as armed mercenaries hunt you down to ensure your silence.

SOS's graphics are functional and feature bland textures. The characters come across as robotic, the dialogue and voice acting are stilted. What the game does have is a bountiful amount of atmosphere. The feeling that you never quite know what's going to happen next is a welcome and increasingly rare commodity. The ability to shout, in the attempt to attract survivors, highlights the eerie silence and the varied locales keeps it engaging. Trademark Japanese oddness comes in the form of some wonderful yet irrelevant set pieces, collectables and multiple endings. Overall, SOS is a flawed work, but it contains some fresh, inspirational ideas that make it worth experiencing. --Jonathan Winter

Customer Reviews

Unusual and mostly exciting
"SOS The Final Escape" is a variant of the survival horror genre, but in this case, you are trying to escape from a natural disaster rather than zombies or monsters.
Playing as a new reporter arriving on the huge island city, you begin the game stranded on a long bridge as the first tremor strikes the island. What follows is a precarious attempt to make your way throught the destroyed city to find a place of safety.
The most impressive thing about the game is the sense of scale. The city is genuinely huge, towering buildings can be seen stretching into the distance, as well as raised freeways and public spaces-all of which can shake and crumble away at any time! The excitement of playing comes when a tremor suddenly hits as you are teetering across a narrow ledge, or running under a swaying office block, and the game designers have thought of many novel ways of putting your character in jeopardy, often springing cruel surprises on you when least expected. As the main character you have a variety of moves, although there is no way to attack, but as the danger is purely a natural one, there would appear to be no use for this...until the last third of the game when you suddenly find yourself under threat from armed thugs, and an element of stealth and avoidance joins in with the general escape mission. This last part of the game is by far the best, and the tension really mounts up in the climax as what remains of the city starts to sink ever more rapidly into the sea, and time begins running out. It makes up for the initial parts of the game, where some of the trials and puzzles can get a little repetitive.
You also meet various characters along the way, and the choices you make with them can lead you to any of 7 different endings.

All in all, this is a game to be recommended. It's certainly a new slant on the survival adventure type of game, and, despite being rather short, its an entertaining enough experience to warrant a purchase, as well as a couple of replays to see what you missed.

Classic survival horror
Firstly, the following things are true: The graphics aren't great, the frame-rate is, at time, shocking, and the camera has a lot to answer for. This game, like most all games, is not without its problems.
However - this game makes up for all these shortcomings with incredible finesse.

The first time you see a building crumble, the game captivates you. For the first time outside of Sim City, the city you are in seems very real, and very vulnerable. Something as simple as walking a long a street becomes potentially hazardous... when you see the bridge to your left ominously sway.

And therein lies the beauty of the game. Success is about quick wits, about getting the hell out of the way when another earthquake hits. Yes, there are 'instant death' scenarios... but once you've experienced them, you think to yourself: 'were I in that situation, would I actually walk into a subway train which is dangling off a bridge?'. The game teaches you lessons, and forces you to act.

As a result, it never fails to excite. Scenarios such-as an entire restaurant slowly crumbling and sliding into the ocean while you are finding valuable items keep the tempo high, and these types of scenarios occur on a regular basis.

Much has been said about the awkaward qualities of the voice acting and script, but having played for four hours, I can honestly say it doesn't grate. The script is of a low standard, but this adds to the game, giving it that quirky japanese feel that games like this benefit from greatly.

To conclude: a brilliant game, plagued (but not killed) by some animation glitches. If you liked Project Zero, or liked Resident Evil but not the zombies, then this is a must-buy.

A new game that is innovating and exciting
This is definitely a winner. This game has been perfectly created to give you a perfect mix of excititment and thinking. The idea of this game is that you are a person who rescues people. Wow you may think "fantastic" but this game has been compiled so incredibly that pulling people from train wrecks dangling off a cliff can be incredibly good fun.

There are only one or two minor glitches in this game. One of them being the camera angles. Sometimes you can too easily fall off a ledge or cliff while struggling with the camera.

These glitches should be overlooked though because this is a fantastic game that earns anyones 40 quid