By Kevin "Berserker" Hall
Emergency Mayhem
Player(s): 1-4
What do you do from day to day to reduce chaos and panic in your life? Do you
clean your room? Help your parents out with chores? Try to multitask at a job?
Have you every tried to reduce panic while driving? Well, thanks to Emergency
Mayhem and your Wii-mote, you can, but do you really want to take up this
challenge? Read on and find out.
The core gameplay in Emergency Mayhem is the driving portion where you take
on the role of one of three emergency vehicles to reduce mayhem in the city.
Choose a precinct of the city then choose from operating a police car, a fire
truck, or an ambulance. The objective with all vehicles is to reduce mayhem. For
the police car, you will race to the scene of thefts, chase down criminals in a
getaway car, fix flat tires, among other types of police work. With the fire
trucks, put out fires, fix leaky fire hydrants among other tasks. And finally
with an ambulance, rush to a scene to revive a citizen or help get a fly out of
a guy's chest... yes, you heard that right.
Each job requires the player to find an emergency scene by following an
onscreen arrow on the top portion of the screen. The emergency area is always
showcased by a glowing circle. Plow right through a group of pedestrians or turn
over plenty of other cars and trucks while in your attempt to reach the scene to
reduce mayhem. Yes, the game takes itself very lightly. One thing that really
got on my nerves at times was the lack of an onscreen map in this game. The
problem doesn't really showcase itself well until you get down to the last few
tasks and you are not close enough to the next task so that the onscreen arrow
will guide you. This leads to a lot of extra driving in order to find the
correct proximity to receive another help arrow.
Anyway, once the emergency scene is reached you will either play a mini game
or have to deliver some items or go to another destination. Each driving stage
is timed and you will receive extra time by performing tasks or by collecting
clock icons. Once enough jobs have been finished then you are required to go
back to your headquarters and the stage ends. The driving gameplay of Emergency
Mayhem is much like playing Crazy Taxi. To sum the whole game up, it is Crazy
Taxi without pedestrians and with added mini games.
No matter what vehicle is chosen, the core gameplay feels the exact same
until a new scene is reached. Each vehicle requires the same main task - reach
the glowing circle by following the arrow. There is no evidence of any chaos or
need of help until your vehicle stops on the glowing circle. The only real
differentiation between the jobs is the vehicle that you drive and the mini
games that you will perform.
All of the mini games make use of the Wii-mote's motion sensitive controls.
Move the Wii-mote up and down to pump water in order to put out a fire, rotate
the Wii-mote to turn a crank in order to tighten the bolts on a leaky fire
hydrant, quickly move the Wii-mote downward to revive a citizen, use the
onscreen pointer to match up electrical cords in order to fix a traffic light,
among many other types of mini games. There is quite a bit of variety in the
mini games but most of them become repetitive after the first few times. The
game will require you to go through a select few mini games multiple times on
the beginning precincts then it will start to mix them up more when the next
precinct is reached by offering newer minigames.
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