Rockstar State Of Emergency

So I have to go over there and hit him with the briefcase...oh now I have to break windows and whats that...I can't hurt anyone now..oh now I can.

Right I did that now what? This is just a melee of stuff with fast paced music and lots of screen activity to make you think your achieving something. It could have been a brilliant game.....but it is playable...for about......1 hour.

like the last review i was looking forward to playing on it i did enjoy it for a while (about 3 days)solid playing but it does become a drone to play so i only recommend hiring it(sorry rockstar)

I have to say I was very much looking forward to State Of Emergency on the Sony Playstation 2, a game coming from Rockstar who recently produced the superb grand theft auto 3. Unlike grand theft auto 3 there was nowhere near as much publicity for this game and having played it, it's easy to see why.

SOE only has two modes of gameplay on offer and it has to be said neither of them are any good. Revolution is the main mode of the game where175 missions are spread over four stages. You are given a choice of two characters to begin with and a further three are unlockable through completing the various tasks. The characters are purely cosmetic to the game, from what I can tell there is hardly any difference between them. If one character is as good as the other, it begs the question: where is the motive in unlocking them? When you play the game, the first thing you notice are the missions, they are really quite pathetic. Unlike GTA3, there has been no effort what so ever to involve the player in the story, the mission briefings are short and brief and create no sense of urgency. In short no effort has been made to make SOE's revolution mode an engaging or entertaining experience. Apart from a few, I found the missions themselves to be boring, unfair and generally no fun. In most of the missions it is simply luck if you complete them or not. The most obvious ones are the ones where you have to protect a certain character from being killed. In the mall stage, you have to protect a hacker. Armed with no weapon you are expected to face literally about 10 guards at once. The thing is they aim straight for your hacker and normally kill the character in about a few blows before you have any time to retaliate. This is made even harder in later where the guards have weapons and the character can normally die in one shot. The fighting system is poor as well which doesn't help with the proceedings. The fighting system is similar to GTA3 but there you didn't have to fight all the time, in this game with so much combat required, it should be first rate. This game classes itself to be a free roaming fighting game but I am sure that anyone who has played this game will not find the "Deep selection of hand-hand fighting moves" evident. The same old punch-punch combo will be enough to get you through out the entire game and the move where you knock everyone down takes a few seconds to initialise meaning that in heated situations it never is effective as you will get plummeted every time. What's the point? I wouldn't call this a tough learning curve, I would call this bad game design. Another example of poor mission design is the one where you have to locate and kill someone. Thanks to so many people on screen it is so easy to search for ages finding the right character. In some missions as soon as I got the briefing about 20 seconds later I got the mission failure screen with me so much as doing anything. This game is poor. Ask anyone, most of the missions are simply down to luck, there rarely is any skill involved. If one was really pessimistic and critical about this game, it seems almost that the revolution mode was an ill-conceived afterthought, the missions are lifeless and I didn't gain any satisfaction from completing them.

Anyone expecting the glorious free roaming environment of GTA3's Liberty City will find themselves immensely disappointed with the box type levels of SOE. The levels themselves are tiny in comparison to GTA3. Indeed the Mall stage at the beginning was enough to send me to sleep with its small limited environment. Sure the backgrounds are interactive but smashing up the same shop level after level was more tiresome then anything else. People have said there is a lot of detail to the graphics. I question this. Though the graphics are somewhat decent, you find that the backgrounds and shops repeat themselves no end. In the end I couldn't wait to get out of the Mall stage hoping things would improve but they didn't, they only got worse. By the time I completed Chinatown, I pretty much knew what to expect from this game and I knew I couldn't care less about progressing on.

The chaos mode of the game is even more of a let down. The chaos challenges themselves can be incredibly hard especially in the East side and Corporate levels. Trying to amass a huge amount of points with hundreds of other guys trying to kill you is almost next to impossible. The unlockable options such as last clone standing get boring far too quickly. Again the fact that there are only four stages does not help matters. There is little incentive to gain high scores.

Although I have been very negative throughout this review, I feel it is has been well deserved. I can honestly say that I cannot think of any good points about this game and I hate to say it but it seems Rockstar has created a game that smacks of laziness. I do not see how they feel this game compliments the great GTA3 and I feel this was merely a game created to try and ride the wave of excitement for players who have GTA3 to death and wanting more. Sadly this is not the game to fill that void. Even for people who love the idea of gratification in running around shooting people will find the game becomes increasingly repetitive after a few hours play. With the lack of even a two player or multi-play option, this game lacks any real replay value. Even after completing SOE, there was no satisfactory ending to the game, just some pointless intermission screen and then to the choose a character screen. No sense of achievement is ever realised making me wonder why I played the game in the first place. The thing is with SOE is that it doesn't really know what kind of game it wants to be. The shooting and fighting people works well in GTA3 and helps convey the fact that you are a criminal going about your business. To base a game solely on this concept in small limited environment in SOE simply doesn't work as well. SOE is truly a limited and flawed game and does not warrant the player's hard earned money. Like GTA3? Go play it some more and wait for a suitable alternative to come out, this simply isn't it.