Emergency Mayhem (Wii) Review

Emergency Mayhem is a fast and frantic take on the arcade racing genre that is unfortunately let down by too much repetition, rushed design and great ideas that don’t seem to have been fully explored. Inspired by the classic Crazy Taxi formula of racing fares across the city against the clock, Emergency Mayhem changes the player’s role from that of taxi driver to an emergency services worker racing to save Crisis City from complete chaos.

Emergency themed mini-games break up the driving action and add something a little different to the mix, but overall there are too many flaws and unrealised opportunities to make Emergency Mayhem stand out in the crowded Wii market. The game puts the player control one of three different emergency services vehicles – police car, fire engine or ambulance – in a race to save Crisis City from a variety of both natural and unnatural disasters. Tasks range from capturing criminals to rescuing injured citizens or putting out fires depending on the type of vehicle being driven.

Where Emergency Mayhem differs from other Crazy Taxi clones is that some tasks require the player to complete a mini-game such as pumping water on to a blazing pile of garbage or pumping up a flat tyre. These mini-games make use of the Wii-remote’s motion sensing capabilities and add some variety to the gameplay, breaking up the standard fetch-quest nature of the genre. The whole concept sounds great and seems like a perfect fit for the Wii’s motion sensing control scheme, but the game is let down by poor controls and a number of other problems in both the driving and the mini-game sections.

Emergency Mayhem ditches the motion sensitive steering used in most Wii driving games in favour of using the nunchuk controller’s analogue stick, which is fine, but not when the vehicle feels like it is driving across ice. Not having the ability to power slide also subtracts from the overall experience. The mini-games are also plagued by inaccurate controls, which is unfortunate because many of the concepts could have been really fun. Games like Zack and Wiki have proven that third party games can have great motion controls that add to the experience, but the developers of Emergency Mayhem have failed to really take advantage of the huge range of motions the Wii-remote is capable of recognising. The controls are not broken, but with a little more tweaking, Emergency Mayhem would have been a much better game.

The poor controls reveal another of the game’s problems, poor traffic and pedestrian AI and a lack of consequences for breaching simple real-world rules. In a game where the objective is to rescue people, it should not be possible to run down 20 pedestrians and still succeed. But with the floaty controls making it impossible to avoid crashing at anything but lowest speeds and the pedestrians not very good at getting out of the way, it feels somewhat counterproductive to what the game’s premise is all about. Also, the level design, while reasonably well handled, lacks the little details that would keep players coming back for more. Half of the fun of Crazy Taxi was finding shortcuts and jumps that could make a journey even a few seconds quicker, Emergency Mayhem fails to provide many opportunities to discover alternate paths, reducing the action to following the arrow until the destination is reached.

Another thing which would have really improved the quality of the game is the level of variety on offer across both the driving missions and the mini-game tasks. With three different vehicles to choose from, there should have been plenty of mission types to explore, instead it is simply a case of dashing from one location to the next as fast as possible. Occasionally, a mission will require the player to avoid any major collisions, but the variety is just not there. The mini-games also suffer the same problem and players will find themselves repeating them often. This repetitiveness really ruins the replay value of the single player mode and since the multiplayer modes are extremely lacklustre, there really isn’t any reason to go back to it after the novelty has worn off.

These negatives are unfortunate as Emergency Mayhem has a certain amount of charm that, if cultivated correctly, could have really made it something more than just another below average Wii third-party game. Despite all its flaws and repetitiveness, the concept really is great. The idea of driving an emergency vehicle at speed through a crowded city should appeal to anyone who has ever fantasised about being able to turn a siren on and floor the accelerator. Including motion controlled mini-games to allow the player to act out the role of police officer, fireman or paramedic is a natural fit and really adds something to the overall theme. Put simply, Emergency Mayhem has all the elements required to be a fun game, but unfortunately, the execution of those ideas falls terribly short.

Visually, Emergency Mayhem is below average, with the crisp frame-rate let down by low-res textures and very basic 3D-models. The Wii is capable of producing far better and it shows. The high frame-rate ensures a good sense of speed and the poor visuals never get in the way of the gameplay, but when a game looks like an early generation Gamecube effort, something needs to be said. The game’s sound effects and music are adequate without ever being anything memorable and all the expected noises accompany the action. The voice work is below average, but does the job. Emergency Mayhem must go down as one of the biggest missed opportunities so far on the Wii. The concept should have made for an extremely fun game with an appeal for the hardcore and casual gamer alike. Instead, Emergency Mayhem is little more than a diversion that will turn most players off within a couple of hours.