VIS for PS2

Action

1Player

A highly over-hyped, very basic arcade-like beat-em-up.

No. First, let’s dispel a common misconception – Grand Theft Auto III was developed by DMA Design and PUBLISHED by Rockstar. State of Emergency was developed by VIS, and also published by Rockstar. Many people equate the publisher with the creator of the game, and because of this, have come to expect the same pedigree of gameplay from State of Emergency that they found in GTA III. If you go into playing SoE expecting it to be another GTA III, you will be severely disappointed. If you keep an open mind, you may find an enjoyable, if somewhat mindless, beat-em-up.

State of Emergency brings old-fashioned arcade-style beat-em-ups into the year 2002 with some cutting edge technology and lots of over the top violence. Cutting to the basics, SoE is kind of like Crazy Taxi without the taxi. You play the part of one of five civil disobeyers (is that a word?) taking part in an ongoing riot against the ‘Big Brother’-like Corporation. In the games best mode, Kaos, you run amok in one of four big stages trying to rack up a huge score by taking out rival gangs and Corporation thugs, and destroying objects, windows, cars, and entire buildings. Every few seconds a new bonus objective appears, giving you added incentive to cause chaos. For example, breaking a storefront window normally rewards you with 500 points, but if the Windows x5 bonus appears, you’ll be getting 2500 points for each one instead. There are also point-based ‘stages’ you can achieve, and at each new stage the opposition gets tougher and you’ll also receive a bit more time on the countdown clock. By taking out Corporation soldiers you can also increase your remaining time.

You can pick up many objects and there are a good variety of weapons at your disposal as well. All of these have appropriately satisfying results, from the hilarious (bashing some poor sucker in the melon with a beer keg) to the disturbing (hacking off limbs and heads with a hatchet, and then using a severed head to bludgeon other opponents), to the purely functional (clearing a huge crowd of pursuing enemies with the mighty mini-gun).

Although the fact that SoE can display an insane number of polygonal characters onscreen simultaneously with nary a hint of slowdown, the obvious drawback is that the models are relatively plain and lacking detail. Also, 99% of the people running amok are meaningless – you don’t get points for wiping out rioting civilians, and they don’t have any affect on your character at all save for obscuring your view and occasionally serving as fodder for one of the particularly devastating weapons.

A big part of making a game like SoE work is the gameplay. Repetitive by nature, the best game in the genre (Streets of Rage 2) succeeds because of the variety of attacks available to the player. SoE falls short here. Although the selection of weaponry is impressive, when unarmed you’ve got a disappointing number of ways to attack. Basically you can punch, kick, perform a running tackle and execute a couple of brutal grab/throws. There’s no jump, so no jump kicks or aerial attacks at all.

The ‘story’ mode feels tacked on, and is not as much fun as the freeform Kaos mode, because the missions vary wildly from laughably simple to extremely frustrating. Because of this, SoE is fun to play in short bursts, but becomes boring after extended sessions.

Heck yeah! Consider Exhibit ‘A’ – all of the GTA III fans who fully expected SoE to be the next great thing. Sure, it’s a decent game in its own right, but there’s a night and day of difference between the two games, including two different developers, and comparisons just aren’t fair.

Gameplay – 6 (More ways to attack and a slightly better camera would have helped tremendously)

Graphics – 8 (The hundreds of rioters onscreen is impressive, but ultimately meaningless. The game looks good, but not great)

Sound – 7 (Surprisingly, for a game that takes place in the middle of a riot, there’s not a lot of realistic background noise going on. Basically the mob has a few canned yells and screams, and there are a lot of alarms going off all the time)

Replay – 7 (Kaos mode is a lot of fun, very similar in play mechanics to Sega’s Crazy Taxi, with the same kind of pick up and play gameplay. The story mode won’t be winning any awards, though)

Overall: 7.5