Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: Codemasters
System: Wii
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

The old maxim goes “It’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” And then there are places like Crisis City – the chaotically out-of-control burg at the center of Codemaster’s new Wii release, Emergency Mayhem. The question is would you want to play there?

With a name like Crisis City, you know mayhem is on order. Within the city’s four unlockable precincts, crimes and misdemeanors crop up for the player to get under control. Still, despite the open world gameplay and the ability to tear through the streets in a variety of emergency vehicles, this is no Grand Theft Auto clone. Rather, Emergency Mayhem owes a lot of its inspiration to SEGA’s old arcade hit, Crazy Taxi.

Emergency Mayhem tasks the player with selecting one of three emergency vehicles – a police cruiser, a fire truck or an ambulance – and then sets them loose in the city to hunt down role specific events. In a corner of the screen rests the Mayhem Meter. As the player completes missions, “order” is restored to the Mayhem Meter. Once the player fills in approximately 85% of the meter, they are granted a promotion and thus access to the next precinct on the map. Bear in mind, that all of this is played out against a persistent timer that counts down to zero. If you fail to raise the mayhem meter to the target level before the clock runs out, you’ll lose the mission and be forced to start over, adding a stressful race-against-time dynamic to the proceedings.

While the bulk of the game is played behind the wheel as the player navigates the bustling cityscape, the various missions often take the form of minigames, which in true Wii fashion, often involve some form of waggle gimmick. Players might be called upon to mime a tire pump while helping stranded motorists, turn a crank to release water pressure from a hydrant, or perform some simple surgical operations to extract foreign objects from stricken civilians. The developers boast that the game contains 30 different minigames but in reality, some of these minigames are variations of similar themes.