You know how crowds always gather around car wrecks and fires? People have some kind of morbid fascination with disasters, it seems. Emergency! Disaster Rescue Squad indulges this macabre part of peoples psyche but also gives them the power to rescue the people in trouble. Players call the shots at the scene of the accident and have the full use of the police, fire department, and hospital to get things under control.
Emergency! EMERGENCY! Although in the age of cell phones and other gadgets no one yells that out anymore rather than call 911. But it is still and interesting concept. Emergency pretty much places you in the eyes and ears of an Emergency Dispatcher. Some bad stuff goes down in your fictional city and it is your job to send out the right emergency crews to do the job right. But it doesn't end there; you will also have to make sure they do the job to the best of their abilities. Seeing as innocent (and very slow and dim-witted) lives are at stake here. You can't afford to mess up. It's a shame your biggest enemy happens to be incompetence in the workforce.
Tech-Gaming writes: "Although the genre is largely overlooked by critics, fans must adore the time-management simulation. How else could one explain the proliferation of operation supervision titles like Cake Mania, Sally's Salon, and Diner Dash? Each is strikingly similar, requiring players to prioritize a situation that becomes ever-increasingly hectic. As the aforementioned titles indicate, even the game's settings offer little more than variations on a form. Surely, the genre could be contextualized to introduce locales beyond restaurants, cake shops, and beauty parlors."
WP writes: "Of all the DS games that I checked out this week, Emergency! Disaster Rescue Squad was easily the best of the bunch, and while it's not going to be a game that impresses most, it's certainly more unique than I expected it to be. After the success of titles like Trauma Center on the DS, developers have been wanting to tap into the pseudo-real drama aspect of gaming, and we've seen a lot of adventure, text-heavy games like Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk and so on do a great job of tackling that aspect. Until Emergency!, though, we haven't seen many good representations of the strategy genre on the DS."
