Once you have your vehicles at the scene, you must begin a slow and tedious
process of issuing a very linear set of orders. Select doctor, click on
injured engineer. Select fireman and apply jaws of life to car.
Select paramedics to carry stabilized engineer into ambulance. And so on.
There's no strategy here in this real-time strategy game. There are not
multiple solutions to choose from, no need to control crowds of onlookers (the
citizens in the game are completely blasé to anything disasterous that happens in
their burg), no dynamically changing situations to deal with. Instead, the
game's designers tried to build challenge into the game through obscure
objectives and puzzle solutions.
 |
| The command center. Most of the buttons don't do anything. |
Let's return to our accident scene. Everyone is patched up and shipped
off, but the mission hasn't ended. After spending a little time trying to
determine if you need to manually end a mission, another train shows up and
smashes into the first. The game then informs you that you need to stop
traffic on the tracks. Oh really? Thanks for mentioning that in the
first place. After starting the mission again from the beginning, you
dispatch a police car with the other vehicles to help stop train traffic.
When the squad car arrives, you realize that you have no idea how to stop train
traffic. Park the car on the tracks? Smash! Wrong, start
again. What you should have done was selected a policeman and then clicked
on a little block next to the tracks. Turns out that it is a switch box
that will keep other trains away. Great, but the mission is still not
over. Why? Who knows? You'll need to break down and check the
mission hints to find out that you need to tow the wrecked car off of the
tracks. A check of the in-game encyclopedia will inform you that tow
trucks are part of the fire department, but when you go to the fire station
there won't be a tow truck in sight. After endless searching, you may be
lucky enough to find that the tow truck is a yellow flatbed vehicle parked near
its own building on another part of the map.
Things only get worse in later missions. The first mission provides you
with enough hints that you can make your way through the obscure objectives, but
later missions will often provide a single hint - a hint along the lines of
"prevent the hostages from being killed." No kidding! This makes the
game maddeningly frustrating to play as the solutions to some levels don't make
all that much sense. For example, the second level involves a guy who
snaps and holds his child hostage while demanding that he be allowed a phone
call with his ex-wife. You can probably guess that it's a good idea to
send a police negotiator out to talk to the guy, but if you order him to talk
the guy more than once or twice, the mission ends with the guy setting a grenade off.
Should you try to place an officer in another building to keep the guy in his
sites? No, that would make too much sense. It seems that you need to
get the guy's wife on the phone like he demands, but the problem is there is no
phone nearby. I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted looking
for a phone. Ready for the solution that took a painfully long time to
discover? You need a helicopter to fly a police officer to an island so
that he can ask a girl in a bikini where the wife is. It seems that she is
on a yacht, so you have to fly to the boat, ask it to dock, talk to the wife,
put her on the helicopter, fly her to the street outside her ex-husband's
apartment, order her to be taken towards the building, and then, boom, the
mission abruptly ends. Why did the game even bother to mention a phone?
Why did the police bring the ex-wife into a dangerous situation when the guy himself
simply asked for a phone call? How come the crisis was never resolved and no
arrest was made?
Therein lies the fundamental problem with the game. It is not a
strategy game, but a poorly designed puzzle game. The puzzles are poorly
explained and the solutions obscure and not really logical. The only
challenge in the game is avoiding frustration-induced madness. This is
just not my idea of fun.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
40%. You'll need emergency services yourself after spending time with
this game.
System Requirements: Pentium III 600; 128 MB RAM; 16 MB
Video RAM; 8x CD-ROM; 300 MB Hard Drive
Space; Mouse.
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