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Emergency Mayhem (Wii)
By: Adam Waddilove Crazy Taxi meets the emergency services? If you say so In Emergency Mayhem time is your enemy, relentlessly counting down as you take charge of a fire truck, ambulance, or police car to speed through the city's eight different districts to the next emergency. Have you got the nerves necessary to beat the clock and save the city? Find shortcuts, such as making use of the city's underground railways lines and even sewers, to get there on time and save the day. When you reach the scene of the emergency play switches to one of over 30 mini-games which take unique advantage of the Wii Remote to solve crazy crises. Using the Wii Remote, you'll have to pump to practice CPR, point it to direct water from a powerful hose, mimic a wrench to bring bursting water-hydrants under control and aim it to fire tranquilizer darts into on-the-rampage monkeys! Emergency Mayhem lets you drive around small cities as either one of the 3 emergency services: Ambulance, Fire Brigade or the Cops. Essentially you drive for the majority of the game, stopping at waypoints for missions which are short mini-games relevant to the service you represent. Once Mayhem has been averted to a level, you’ll be asked to return to the base and get promoted. It’s that simple, no complicated plot or game methods here, just a simple do missions and come back. The problem for me is that the missions are repeated too often. Plus you’ll spend more time driving from Point A to Point B then actually doing mini-games. Some missions aren’t mini-games but a collection of more driving from location to location, while others will see you ramming a criminal car or racing against the clock, but it’s repeated to the point where you’ll get bored within minutes. The mini-games themselves aren’t exactly great either, imagine doing the one handed mini-games in Wario Ware with the nunchuck attached, it gets in the way as it doesn’t play a part in them. They aren’t particularly difficult either and even if you do fail, you’ll get an instant chance to retry it without fear of consequences; it’s just too easy on any difficulty and will certainly disappoint. The only reason you use the nunchuck is for driving, but why not make it a one-handed remote game and use the remote to drive like in Mario Kart Wii? The handling may have been better and the mini-games less annoying with the addition of an unusable add-on.    Graphically, the game looks like it could have been a very bad looking PS2 game but sadly it’s a Wii one. Unfortunately it’s clear that this is a port with motion support tacked on, they would have done better releasing it as an arcade title on the Xbox 360 or a game on the PSN. Why they took this route is certainly questionable, but not entirely without reason. It’s clear that the Wii is the biggest console at the moment and there are loads of mini-game collections, but very few that are any good. Yet they are all selling at an amazing rate, so no wonder the market is being flooded with them. Sadly, this is setting a precedent that most Wii games are bad when they aren’t. There are so many great games for the system but games like this certainly won’t help its image. It’s just too basic and it runs out of ideas within 5 minutes, it truly does. Plus the game isn’t exactly long or fun to play, with friends or by yourself..It’s not as good as you might imagine. The Verdict Emergency Mayhem is yet another example of a game trying to work on the Wii and failing by not putting enough effort into it. The controls feel tacked on and the game runs out of steam really quickly, more than I’ve ever come across in a videogame. It looks plain bad, it handles badly and it isn’t much fun to play. In other words, stick to Wario Ware/Wii Play/Wii Sports.etc and give this a complete miss. 
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