Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

State of Emergency 2

1. Official Site
2. Platform: PS2
3. Publisher: Southpeak Interactive
4. Developer: DC Studios
5. Release Date: 02/14/06
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

Fans of Unreal Tournament 2004 can easily cite their individual top five best experiences with the game and few will be the same. My personal favorite is the inspired choice of voice acting for the female announcer who gets hotter the more kills you deliver. Her sexual excitement gets heavier as you ratchet up the body count bringing her almost to the point of release if your, ahem, stamina can keep it up.

Now imagine if lounge-singer/comedian Richard Cheese had swapped places with her and you have the announcer during the challenge sections of State of Emergency 2. If that were the game’s lone failing then I’d consider listening to a guy cheerily say "That went right through his skull!" an awkwardly funny choice instead of one example among many of why there should never be a third installment.

Mere words cannot express just how far away people should stay from this game though if you input the address of your local EB Games into Google Maps then find a spot 50 miles away consider that a good start. This thing will waste both your time and your energy with the lone saving grace being that it can be completed inside of a day.

It may sound harsh to criticize a game’s graphics as amateurish, but by this point in the PS2’s lifecycle there is no excuse for epically weak visuals. I recall complaining about Rogue Ops and Call of Duty: Finest Hour being so dark that it was difficult to tell where you were going even during well lit sequences and State of Emergency 2 is no different until the end. This might just be a failing on my part since programming games for the PS2 is an alien skill to me but is the software configured in such a way that adding a gain slider is out of the question? The first three missions all take place on an island prison at night so naturally one assumes that things will be dark. The surprise here is that gamers will be hard-pressed to see exactly what they’re doing during the night missions, and will continue to struggle during the daylight hours.

To illustrate how poor this game’s graphics are I say they would be right at home on the Nintendo 64. If the artists went for throw-back designs reminiscent of early 90’s arcades then the goal was achieved. Putting State of Emergency 2 between Smash TV and Gauntlet would have lead to untold amounts of success. Please take note of how I have yet to leave the topic of graphics from a decade ago.

The playable characters all feel cut from the same mold regardless of which ones you switch between and while the enemy death animations are initially fun to watch you’ll quickly yearn for more variety than just two options. The maps themselves merely functional and none of them require any thought of how to get around. The toughest things get is when you lose your path because the darkness makes it tough to see. The city interior is fun to run around and blow stuff up in but after playing the same map time and again it quickly grew stale.

For a game this weak on practically every aspect, at least the sound effects were the hardest to screw up. Everything from the voice acting to the explosions to the gunfire all could have been pulled from a generic sound package. The hero is gruff and emotionless, the muscle and Spanky both sound like they were raised in the ghetto, the computer nerd sounds like a marketing wizard’s idea of what a computer nerd should sound like, and so forth. It’s also tough to really pull for the heroes since the only challenge they face in the entire game is a generic army for a faceless corporation. There is no super villain to root against (or for depending on your ideology), so there is no over-the-top voice acting to enjoy.

The explosions you’ve heard before, the gunfire sounds like basic gunfire from any movie or game, and the crowd riots sound like they were recorded at a football game. That’s American football for the GT readers around the globe. Whenever the player incites people to riot you’ll have one or two stand around shouting about how they want to take down the system. I counted four possible reactions of the crowd to other rioters and even then I may have miscounted. The sound design here does its job but is far removed from imaginative.

The controls are pretty basic for State of Emergency 2 since the game always lets you know when you need to hit which buttons. Whenever you get near a ladder or something that can be activated a giant X will appear onscreen. The R1 button fires your weapon while the R2 is the secondary fire mode. When you hold the sniper rifle this brings up the targeting reticule and L1 and R1 zoom in and out. That’s about all you ever need to know about this game since it is run-and-gun start to finish.

The only things left out of the onscreen prompts are how exactly to access the sub-menu to control allies. When near a crew of gangbangers hold down the left thumbstick and this brings up four options to choose from. Once your crew is under your control, accessing this menu lets you direct them into combat or support roles.

Where the controls suffer the most is in the vehicles because all of them are ridiculously tough to maneuver. Try driving one of the tanks with anything approaching accuracy and you’ll learn a harsh lesson in futility. Ditto driving the APC. The one vehicle that’s actually not to bad to control is the speed boat late in the game but the failing there I pin more on the fact that it’s incapable of what the environment and challenge both require of it.

State of Emergency 2 is hands-down an early contender for Worst Game of the Year. The game is just not fun so if you take nothing else away from this review then know that your money is better spent anywhere else. It’s sad to see a game with a great setup squander all hope of quality not 15 minutes after the introduction. The opening is simply killer with players taking control of the main character during his gas chamber execution. After destroying everything and everyone in sight he runs out to the main area and finds he needs to flip four separate levers to unleash the prison populace on the evil guards. Everything up to this point is pretty solid, if unattractive, but once the guards charge in and shoot only at you the Fun-O-Meter™ starts precariously drifting towards the red line.

The game only becomes more frustrating and generic as you work to escape the island and head to the city, and this gets players up to level four and five where you take control of the gangbanger Spanky. Spanky is the lone character with some personality and no, blue spiked hair does not count as a character’s personality. State of Emergency 2 only stars generic arch-types from rugged hero to omniscient computer whiz to muscle-bound black guy and not one of them stands out as anything special. Only Spanky’s attitude differentiates him from the others because otherwise he’s little more than a loud-mouth version of the muscle.

Once players take control of him the game should be hitting its stride, yet nothing engaging happens. At this point, the game feels like you’re playing an R-rated version of Anachronox. Players run around a dirty, high-tech city where the have’s live in towering skyscrapers and the have-not’s dwell in the rotten ghettos. Were keener intelligences behind the game design then some smart social satire might even have emerged. But what’s left to us is the game’s calling card of inspiring citizens to riot via destroying everything in sight. What no one seems to get though is how this in no way affects the game.

Oh sure, players will earn more money and a better overall rating the more destruction they cause but they can’t buy anything with it. Opening the different challenges only feels like opening different levels of pain because all of them have ridiculously high requirements to meet in order to pass them, and I can’t point to a single one of them as something worth spending time with. By the end game you’re left with all this cash and no where to spend it. What’s the point of that? I could understand it if there were weapon, vehicle, or skill upgrades somewhere in the game yet all I’m left with is unleashing Spanky on the populace for some quick grins. Sadly, even letting rip with Spanky isn’t enough to save this because you still have to drive vehicles that have absolutely zero maneuverability.

If players make it to chapter 11 they’ll find one of the single most frustrating levels of any game I’ve ever played. Outside of the first half of it where you have to play a mini-game of which-door-is-not-like-the-others in order to advance (and opening the wrong door lets in four or five of the most annoying enemies in the game), you have to control a speed boat while trying to destroy another boat in a high-speed chase. Here’s the catch: The boat by itself is not tough to control, but it is tough to turn sharply without hitting the edge of the marina. Normally this might not be an issue but the collision detection is so out of whack here that if you miss a sharp turn, which you will many times, the boat bounces off the wall and then you have to work to turn it around and get it back on course. By this point, the guy you’re chasing is gone and you have to start the sequence over again. This doesn’t even take into account the canon on the front of the boat fires its shots in an arc so you have to judge distance between you and the target in order for it to hit perfectly.

At no point is any of this fun, period. Do not play State of Emergency 2. Trust me when I say that I suffer so you don’t have to.

There are a few different gameplay modes available that show gamers just how many other ways State of Emergency 2 is not any fun. Progressing through the game will unlock different cheats and modes like "Kill All the Snipers" and "Destroy Everything On Screen" but why bother? At this point, you’ll want to be done with it and either toss it or trade it in.

My advice is simply... don’t.

If I may be blunt for a moment let me state quite clearly that State of Emergency 2 outright sucks. This is a game so weak in execution, bland, repetitively constructed and poorly balanced that one wonders how it made it out of testing alive. I wasted a day of my life playing through this and now that day is gone forever. So too will this coaster be as soon as I’m finished with this review.

Gaming Trend Score

53

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 60
4. Gameplay: 50
5. Value/Replay: 25
6. OVERALL:53