Platform: Nintendo Wii

Genre: Action / Party

Number of Players: 1 - 4
 

A few years back, Acclaim Entertainment announced the game Emergency Mayhem at the 2004 E3, but the company soon filed for bankruptcy and technically, that should have been the end of things. However, the rights for the game were soon purchased by Warner Bros and the game was now under development by Codemasters. Again, it should be the end of the story, but soon Codemasters announced that they were now taking over not only the development but the publishing, and now that I’ve had a chance to play Emergency Mayhem, the idea of letting sleeping dogs like seems to be very appropriate.

Emergency Mayhem went from being a multi-platform title to a release only for the Nintendo Wii, and one that attempts to utilize the motion sensitive controls. The gameplay consists of a series of mini games as players take on the role of the police, paramedics, and fire department in the chaotic location of Crisis City. Just the name alone really explains why things are in such shambles.

Depending on which of the three you’ve decided to play, your missions will be based around it. Many have compared part of the idea behind the game to that of Crazy Taxi, and that’s really quite accurate as you will be driving from place to place trying to assist those in need. This puts you on a time limit, though you can collect clock icons to increase the counter while the Mayhem Icons will drop the Mayhem Level of the city just a little as your objective is in fact to restore order to the city. There are also bonus point icons, each which are designed for the emergency unit you are playing. The police grab donuts, not a big surprise, the Fire Department gets hot dogs and paramedics will pick up coffee.

To find missions, it’s actually really simple as you have an arrow to point you in the right direction. You must however participate in missions specific to your job. The police can’t assume the role of paramedics, so sticking to what you know best is the key. The missions are all time based, though they aren’t always straight forward, but eventually you’ll get the hang of it. Some however are very easy to understand, such as ramming criminals off the road, fixing leaking fire hydrants and such. There are missions that are your basic idea of getting something from point A to B, but of course, time is working against you. There are missions to defuse bombs or help patients in need, rewire lights, and quite a few other things. If you fail a mission, you are free to retry it while succeeding means that you help the mayhem level just a little more.

When time expires in what is more or less the over world portion of the game, that’s the end of your run. There are four different portions to Crisis City, each with different missions and different levels of difficulty. You can also play the party mode for some multi-player fun, but the thing is that you’d actually need to find where the fun is. If you stick with the comparisons to Crazy Taxi, Emergency Mayhem is really the lowest common denominator. Crazy Taxi is fun whereas this game is simply an annoyance that plays horribly in just about every aspect. The controls are horrible, the lack of any real description the first time through with some mini games makes the game painfully frustrating, and there’s nothing that Emergency Mayhem does to really make itself memorable or exciting.

The graphics don’t add much to the game either. The cars are blocky and unimaginative, and this isn’t necessarily just because it’s a game on the Wii so much as it was just poorly designed. The level designs are bland The characters on the street tend to be the victims they are supposed to represent, only it’s the victim of generic animation which is applied to all of them. The colors are horrendous, flat, and literally suck any life that Emergency Mayhem might have had right out of it. Bad game play, bad idea, and bad graphics really don’t add up to anything good.

Codemasters really should have just left this game alone. It wasn’t something that was gamers were concerned or stressed about not seeing hit the marketplace. The strange thing is, Codemasters has released some outstanding games on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, but so far their efforts for the Wii have been half-hearted at best. Emergency Mayhem is just another in a long line of games for the Nintendo Wii that want to jump on the party bus, but I think in this case it was the short bus that they got on by mistake.
 

-mike-