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The hype behind State Of Emergency was near that of its big brother, Grand Theft Auto 3. Hype can do one of two things, first, it can make the game sell amazingly well if the game can live up to the hype. If the game doesn’t live up to the hype, it can completely kill the game, and it’s sales. State Of Emergency had an incredibly high amount of hype, and everyone had extremely high expectations for this game. The question is, did it live up to the hype? To find out whether it did live up to the hype, we must first examine the five major points that make a game great, visual, audio, control, and fun. First let’s start off with the visual aspect of SOE. The graphics are horrible, but it’s excusable because of the number of players that can be on screen at one time. Never, the whole time that I was playing this game, did I experience one bit of slowdown. You can have twenty people surrounding you, and no slowdown whatsoever. This game looks almost identically like GTA3, only it’s more bloody (hard to imagine, but it is). You can literally blow someone’s head off and then pick it up and start beating other people with it. So, considering what they’ve accomplished with the PS2 hardware, and having so many characters on screen at one time, the lack of the flashy graphics we’ve become accustomed to is excusable.
Next, let’s move to the audio. The audio is great, you hear all the things that you’d expect to hear in a riot, but it mostly comes out as chaotic noise. This is good, because at a riot, it’s all chaotic. You can hear people breaking into windows and stealing anything they can get their grubby little hands on, you can hear alarms going off, just about anything you can imagine. Also, when you open fire on a large crowd, you can hear their pleading and begging for you not to shoot them (it’s really quite sadistic and horrible…). Overall, the sound is great, and I think they achieved what they were going for, madness.
The control in this game is awesome, you can control your character with great ease. It’s much easier to control than GTA3, and the fighting system is much better than that of GTA3 also. You can be surrounded by a large group of people and easily fight all them at once. You can just press in the other direction and turn around and start beating the junk out of the guy behind you. There is also a button you can push in order to make your character do a “super” punch or kick, and this is really fun to just randomly do on rioters running around. After you hit someone, and they’re on the ground, you can walk up the them and get on top of them and beat them to their merciless death (it’s really quite sadistic and horrible…). The control in SOE definitely live up to the hype, if you can even have hype about controls, but you certainly can’t have a good game without good controls.
The fun that you have playing during the first ten minutes is most likely the most fun that you will have playing this game, because after a while, it just gets repetitive and boring. Over half of the missions consist of taking helpless gang members to certain points where they plan on blowing them to pieces. The other half consist of bringing items from one place to another, and beating the crap out of gang members on the way. Of course, this is only in Revolution mode, but Chaos mode is where the fun is. You just run around, seeing how many people you can kill, how many buildings you can blow to smithereens, and how many cars you can jack up. Overall, this game is a lot of fun, but only within the first ten minutes.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone, and I would only recommend it solely for renting, because by the time the five days is over, you’ll be done with it. Overall, I don’t think that it lived up to the hype at all, and that will kill this game. Playing this game for longer than fifteen minutes at a time makes you wish that you were one of the many civilians that you just mowed over with your chain gun about ten minutes ago. If you still aren’t moved to avoid this game, please rent it before you buy it. Trust me, you won’t regret it, and you’ll be thanking me. -- Chris Vavra, PGNx Media
---- May 23, 2002
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