pixeljerk's Full Review: State of Emergency for PlayStation 2
State Of Emergency is from Rockstar, the company that seems to be comfortable in the mature-rated video game category. They should be, because they're very talented at making games kids should never, ever play. SoE's older brother, Grand Theft Auto III, is by far my favorite PS2 game yet. I, like many others, made the mistake of applying what I know about GTA3 to my purchase of SoE. Big mistake!
Some say that SoE is more violent than GTA3. And while SoE is bloodier, and the violence is non-stop, I'd have to pick GTA3 as more violent for kids. Why? SoE's violence is constant and cartoon-like, especially with the Don Pardo-style announcer telling you "You've killed everyone!" It becomes goofy after a while. It's just shoot shoot shoot with no time to think or plan what's next, and in a fictional society to boot. In GTA3, you plan and plot your attacks in a very realistic environment. You can go on a shooting spree, mow down pedestrians with your car, take a hooker into the park and beat her to death to get your money back after "being" with her, or just walk around town looking for a good time. You can't do any of those in SoE. Well, except for the shooting spree, which is pretty much the whole point of the game. Now, about this game...
Okay, you pop the game in the console and start playing. You get no warmup scenarios, no tutorials... Unlike being eased into the action and taught which buttons to push, like in GTA3, you're just plopped in the middle of a riot. Not a riot that you have started, just one already in progress. Your missions are to destroy the most property and kill the most Corporation officers as possible. In some modes you go until you run out of health or run out of time. You can earn more time and health by killing enemies and running through the respective bonuses that pop up from their corpses. So the game could go on forever as long as you keep killing and finding the bonuses. Or, you can choose 3 or 5 minute missions to get the most destruction done and ultimately the highest score. Also, there are 'last clone standing' modes that require you to kill as many people as possible. Those are the most fun. But, like the rest of the game, they become tiresome and boring very quickly.
Then there's Revolution mode. This is the "story" side of SoE. Well, there's actually no real story. Some character that tells you to run from here to there and back again. Protect some guy as he walks to the bookstore, don't let anyone in, and get him back safe. You do this over and over and over again until you really don't care what happens next. The reason I say this is because most of the time you lose a mission simply because of the game's limitations. I do everything right, but because my character gets stuck in a corner or an enemy magically walks through another character, I lose and have to begin again. It's extremely tedious and gives the player no real motivation to get any of it done. No cinematics, no new weapons. All you get, after every 50 completed tasks, is a new character. 50? Uggggh. And the second character available to unlock is a skinny, computer hacker guy named Freak. Why would anyone take the time to complete 50 missions to unlock such a wimpy character?
Game progress is like this: achieve a certain amount of success on one level and it unlocks features in another, or complete missions to unlock new players. There are four sections of town, the first (Capitol City Mall) is already unlocked. Unfortunately, I unlocked the second and third sections within 30 minutes of playing. I didn't even know what I was doing. I was just mashing the buttons in the middle of all that chaos. That's not a good sign. So, I found some cheats on the internet. And can you believe it?? The cheats actually made the game worse! After adding invincibility, you're begging to die!
The graphics of the game are nothing spectacular. Characters have a cartoonish, almost hip-hop look to them. It's nice that you're running around 200 other people with completely smooth gameplay. But if you look closely, there's really only a dozen different characters. And while the rioting population adds a sense of chaos to the game, they really get on your nerves fairly quickly, becoming a distraction instead of a feature or obstacle. Also, if the game had better automatic camera control, navigating through the streets would be much more enjoyable. Instead, you use the left analog stick to move your character and the right one to control the camera. Even then the camera gets hung up behind a wall every now an then.
Overall, State of Emergency looks like nonstop fun and mayhem on the surface. But after you've played it for ten minutes you've pretty much experienced the rest of the game. Maybe it would have been more interesting if the entire population wasn't already rioting when the game starts. What if you started the riots? What if you get a new weapon after a certain point level? Or if the unlocked characters actually did things differently from the ones you've already played with? Eh, who cares. I already traded the game in a few days ago. What a waste.
The Software Castle Custom Template Payment Shipping Refunds State of Emergency - Playstation 2 - PS2 This is a brand new, factory sealed, North Ameri...More at eBay
Amazing number of characters onscreen simultaneously Simple beat-'em-up gameplay A vast arsenal with which to inflict damage, Platforms: PlayStation2,...More at Amazon Marketplace
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.