July 24, 2006 - Emergency 3 is the latest North American release in Sixteen Tons franchise, published by Montreal based Strategy First. Having been given the opportunity to play (and review) the 2003 release, Emergency 2: The Ultimate Fight for Life, I can safely say that the same elements that made the second release enjoyable are back. Unfortunately, the same overly difficult and frustrating puzzle designs, as well as the non-intuitive and unresponsive user interface have followed it as well.

As I said with Emergency 2, this is a title I really could enjoy. It touches on a field where I have derived interest - the co-ordination and management of emergency services for both standard and extreme crisis management. Like its predecessors, you are responsible for saving lives, and averting larger disasters. You dispatch emergency vehicles, police, fire, ambulance, as well as engineering teams for controlling environmental hazards. Using a 3D isometric view, you send emergency crews to the scene of a disaster, unload them, and secure the scene, resuscitate and remove victims, restrain criminals, put out fires and control any other dangers in the vicinity. You are put into the role of crisis coordinator, and it certainly isn’t an easy one.

Let’s start out with what’s new in Emergency 3. Aside from the stuff you’d expect, the game features an enhanced physics engine supporting crashing buildings and flying debris, as well the graphics have also been vastly enhanced. The higher resolution textures and enhanced detail in the world look outstanding, as well as the improved fire and smoke effects. Character and vehicle animation are still lacking, but at least the world around them looks good. Also new is dynamic rotation in the 3D world (would could have been very helpful for that blasted “virus infected monkey escape” level in Emergency 2). Finally, the game introduces a new mission editor, and unlimited scenario mode, better known as free mode.

Emergency 3 offers two modes of play, free mode where you face an endless number of challenges in managing the emergency services for a large city, and the campaign mode similar to that found in its predecessors. In free play, you are given brief and vague descriptions of incidents in which you have to respond, accidents, minor fires, unknown medical emergencies, and the like. The challenge here isn’t necessarily solving the puzzles, it’s balancing a budget (each unit costs money to dispatch), and micromanaging these units – it quickly becomes tiresome and repetitive.

On the campaign side of things, Emergency 3 offers twenty new missions that vary in objectives, techniques, and difficulty – ranging from hard, harder, and hardest. I’m glad I’ve played the second game in the series, as I can only imagine how difficult it would be to just step into this game for the first time. Emergency 3 opens with a relatively straightforward missions and the difficulty ramps up quickly – much too quickly for even experienced gamers (not to mention beginners) to really want to continue playing deep into the game.

The objectives of each mission are quite varied, forest fires, blazing buildings, massive traffic pileups, train crashes, terrorist attacks, you name it, it’s likely here. Your mission is always the same, get people out of harms way, secure the scene, save lives, and take care of any remaining threats. At your disposal are thirty-five vehicles and a wide array of personnel, everything from pumper and ladder trucks, police and airvac helicopters, fire boats, water bombers, heavy salvage trucks, etc. The standard units are pretty self explanatory, what makes the game difficult to step into is the lack of description as to what each of the specialized units actually does, and what it is useful for. The included documentation is mediocre, and the included tutorials only describe a handful of the units found in the game.