State of Emergency

Dubbed the biggest fighting game in the world to date, State of Emergency portrays just that: the sudden, violent breakdown of urban order in a full-scale riot. SOE offers some flimsy pretext of Evil-Corporation-makes-bad, but it's just that, flimsy. So flimsy, in fact, that Rockstar didn't even bother to link anything to anything else with a coherent storyline: The Corporation is bad, fools are running everywhere, here's a shotgun, get your kill on, homes! It's moronic, but it doesn't really matter. If you want story or mood, you'll pick up Final Fantasy X or Silent Hill 2. Here, you don't want that; you want blood and mayhem, and SOE has it. Set in present-day urban locales (a shopping mall, Chinatown, an unspecified East Side, and a Corporation headquarters, the game offers an initial choice of two characters (one male, one female), which later expands to five. The main game mode, Chaos, is aptly named: You're thrust into a riot-in-progress with cops, gangs, corporate executives, and random crazies running everywhere. The sense of disorder and panic is impressive indeed, as the game supports the presence of hundreds, read it again hundreds, of people in the chosen environment. The object is to score points (and keep time allotted) by jumping in the middle of it and causing as much destruction as possible. Everything, at one time or another, goes. As the riot progresses, new objectives will turn on and off, rearranging your priorities. One minute you'll be awarded point multipliers by blowing away Corporation forces, the next the object will be to wipe out gangs, and the next you'll be rewarded for taking out parked cars or perhaps entire buildings. Civilian casualties in these cases aren't rewarded as such, are even penalized...but civilians tend to get in the way of more frantic operations, and that's just too bad. All the while, the urban chaos is presented without slowdown, even as more bodies than the eye can track are running, fighting, ducking or blowing to colorful bits.

Public property such as benches, chairs, signs, and trashcans can be picked up and hurled at windows, civilians, or security forces, but that's nothing to what happens when you start using the military hardware that litters the landscape for no adequately explored reason. Pistols, shotguns, tasers, swords, gasoline bombs, flamethrowers, Kalishnikovs, M-16s, grenades, and even a man-portable rocket launcher make for some sick, wrong levels of carnage. Remember that fantasy of lobbing live grenades onto the overcrowded floor of a shopping mall during the pre-Christmas rush? Sure, you remember! Well, you get to do it, BOOM and body parts a-flyin' everywhere. Blood up the walls. Bottlenecks of panicked rioters getting machine-gunned into tomato paste at the entrance to an escalator. Headless bodies staggering a few apr�s-death steps before crumpling to the floor. Pick up the heads and use those as weapons, sure, why not? Of course, the crowds running and screaming everywhere aren't entirely defenseless--in fact, groups of five or six of them will gladly stomp your ass into the ground if they get the chance. If you haven't played the game yet, know this--it's every bit as extreme as you're imagining right now: It's the Rodney King video in brilliant, full-color polygons. It's the Saturday-morning Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold Show. Yes sir, mom and dad might waltz through the room and catch a harmless minute or two of GTA3 before moving on, but there's no way in Hell anybody could watch more than a few seconds of SOE without witnessing a complete bloodbath.

Which isn't to say it's not fun; it's just creepy.

In the primary Chaos mode, you'll find a number of sub-game-types including timed variants and "Last Clone Standing" versions, in which a player runs wild in each environment type surrounded by two hundred helpless, unarmed cyborgs which must simply be eradicated in the fastest possible time. Further tacked onto the game is a "Revolution" mode, which tries to be a story mode and sends players on one specific mission after another--escort the operative to the target, bring the trick-explosive merchandise to this location, meet a contact in the mall and then go to another location...it takes on the aspect of doing chores in the backyard for one's allowance, and doesn't do too much to extend the life of the game. Long after you tire of Revolution's relative straight-laced objectives, you'll probably be going back to the sheer chaos of...well, Chaos.

The game is a technical gem for the sheer crowd-sized freak-out it can deliver, but there are a few problems. The camera, for one, is by its very nature finicky and will require tweaking and adjusting at all times. A tap of the shoulder button will realign it behind your character, and the right joystick moves it freely. It helps to develop the instinct to rotate the right stick in the opposite direction of the corner you're about to round (unless running into a huge bolus of heavily-armed security forces at every blind corner is your idea of a good strategy). Also, the gamer's instinctive lizard-brain insists there be a ready Jump function (especially in two-story levels), and it just isn't there. While your character can take on five cops at a time, he is apparently physically incapable of running the wrong way up/down an average escalator, so you'll sometimes get stuck in the entrance to one while running away from predators as you try to find the next weapon. Small things, but noticeable.

State of Emergency isn't a smart game or a subtle game (in fact, it makes some of the more Neanderthal parts of GTA3 look like Masterpiece Theatre by comparison), but it operates reliably, frantically, and smoothly enough to offer a kind of arcade zen experience once you've reached a certain level of proficiency. It's definitely a sick game--right up there with Postal, but much more cranked-up--but wouldn't you know it, it's fun to play, at least for a while. If there's an easily-shocked somebody in the household you'd like to send into a good bristle, so much the better.

Pros

Cons

Bottom Line