Main game
3.00 average rating based on 1 rating
It's not really what you'd call a bad game, but it's hardly a shining jewel either. The concept is novel enough —an RTS-like where you issue commands to a bunch of little guys to take care of disaster areas as quickly and efficiently as possible— and the execution is... acceptable, but it doesn't really have anything that makes it exceptional.
One could say that you can focus on its uniqueness as an outstanding factor, but I found it far easier to note its shortcomings. The engine in general is rather clunky, and bringing up the command buttons for some units, the vehicles in particular, can quickly get laggy and unresponsive. A good chunk of the stages (of which there are not too many, about 20) feel designed to be unwinnable on the first run thanks to some curveball like some distant casualties who are doomed to run out of health and fail you the mission if you don't know to approach them right away, and in a not entirely unrelated note, there's the issue of fires, which can and will spread and rage out of control if you do not figure out the optimum way to deal with them as …
It's not really what you'd call a bad game, but it's hardly a shining jewel either. The concept is novel enough —an RTS-like where you issue commands to a bunch of little guys to take care of disaster areas as quickly and efficiently as possible— and the execution is... acceptable, but it doesn't really have anything that makes it exceptional.
One could say that you can focus on its uniqueness as an outstanding factor, but I found it far easier to note its shortcomings. The engine in general is rather clunky, and bringing up the command buttons for some units, the vehicles in particular, can quickly get laggy and unresponsive. A good chunk of the stages (of which there are not too many, about 20) feel designed to be unwinnable on the first run thanks to some curveball like some distant casualties who are doomed to run out of health and fail you the mission if you don't know to approach them right away, and in a not entirely unrelated note, there's the issue of fires, which can and will spread and rage out of control if you do not figure out the optimum way to deal with them as soon as you begin.
And let's talk about fire for a moment, because it's easily the most aggravating aspect of the game. I suppose you could argue it's somewhat realistic, but having to deal with it in nearly every level from the point it gets introduced, as something that is present at various different points whereas you only have very limited means to try and quench it and keep it from spreading, which are often spread even thinner by virtue of the fact that you'll probably need to reassign them to deal with other things as well, and the fact that it takes ages to put one out even if you have 4 fire engines spraying it— gets old fast. It quickly became the most dreaded aspect of the game for me, along with the aforementioned casualties time limit— the fact that you have to issue two separate commands to take away a stabilized casualty, one to get the stretcher dudes to pick him up and then again for the ambulance to drive off once they're all in it, was probably the second most obnoxious thing to deal with in the game, but it's only that bad because it's always paired with having to keep an eye on the fires, because your fire engines/hose wielders are too dumb to simply move on to any remaining nearby fires once they've put out whichever one you've assigned them to, so you constantly have to baby them.
Still, it's actually because of some of these limitations that the game ends up falling squarely within the "can fit a level comfortably on a trip to the toilet" category, and it's not the worst offering you can dabble in if you're looking for something of that nature.