Emergency: Fighters for Life

by Chris Hudak
January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST

The 411 on some 911 (with no 187)

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Life's not fair; bad things happen to good people; existence is suffering. I'm not spouting these metaphysically limp-wristed, tofu-eating clich�s simply to annoy you, but rather to prepare you for the melancholy fact that you won't get to kill anything in WizardWorks' new real-time strategy game-at least not directly. Emergency: Fighters for Life is that most dubious of electronic-entertainment efforts, a pointedly nonviolent computer game. As wrong as this seems on the surface, kindly read on. Like the song says, There's something happenin' here; what it is ain't exactly clear.

Ain't no "man with a gun over there" in this title, but plenty goes wrong nevertheless. You're put in charge of fire, paramedic, police, and other disaster-battling forces, and the object of the game is saving lives in the aftermath of various crises. Pick your incidental poison-plane crashes, forest blazes, electrical fires, toxin spills, twisters, car wrecks, earthquakes, even terrorist attacks-this visually detailed real-time strategy game makes you clean up after the screw-ups of both man and nature.

With only the lamest excuse for an in-game tutorial, Fighters starts the player off with a relative cakewalk: An auto-motorcycle collision on a rural road, complete with dying victims, a potential gasoline-fire hazard, and the ubiquitous queue of motorists just waiting to form a traffic jam. Missions in Fighters start with a quick survey of the disaster in question, followed by a perusal of a large-area map showing the various staging bases at your disposal (medical centers, police stations, etc.).

The first mission is, logistically, almost a no-brainer. Later, you will actually have to use your brain, dispatching the game's 30 different vehicles, personnel types, and disaster-fighting resources (stretcher-toting medical orderlies, firefighters, traffic-diverting police officers, water-cannon trucks, fire fighting planes, bulldozers, flatbed transports, and more) to where they are most urgently needed.

The actual on-scene operations are, functionally, hardly different from any Command & Conquer game: Click on something, target something else-only in this case, you're loosing medics on wounded people, flatbeds on trashed vehicles, airplanes on firestorms (due to the specific nature of each lifesaving unit, a more methodical, step-by-step tutorial would have been nice).

Each mission starts before you even arrive on the scene: What will you need and, more importantly, what do you have at a given moment? Can you get away with individual doctors' vehicles or will you need a squad of ambulances? What's the minimum number of police officers you can have while still successfully diverting traffic from the crisis areas? (One of the game's more annoying facets is that you'll flawlessly douse a fire and evac all the victims, only to have an unchecked traffic jam ultimately cost you the mission.) Indeed, when the collective reactive force at a given disaster includes too many vehicles, you'll need a mobile command-center just to coordinate the rescue efforts.

Fighters for Life is an admittedly unusual spin on the standard build-swarm-destroy scheme of the real-time strategy genre, and it's sure to be a big hit with the so-called "guardians" who forbid kids to play with toy guns and such. The game's presentation-music, visual style-exhibits a slightly distracting touch of eastern European cheesiness, but none of it really affects the gameplay, and the life-saving spin actually forces the RTS gamer to think in new ways.