Emergency 2

Originally published on my HLTB profile.

Originally written and published on October 4th, 2024.

Emergency 2 has similar gameplay to the original game, just more in-depth. More units, more quality-of-life features like the very useful satellite map and keybinds for game speed, but otherwise it's the same RTS gameplay with some puzzle elements.

While some missions can be rather confusing to solve, hence the puzzle elements, most are much more straightforward and those were the better ones in my opinion. I especially enjoyed the missions, where all the services had to complement each other, like the highway pileup, the prison on fire or the airplane hijacking crash. But the game does offer some tips, so that's at least something.

The graphics, this time, are much nicer and aged pretty well. All the sprites and backgrounds were full of charm, and it was just lovely to look at.

I do have some gripes, though. One being how frustrating some missions can be with their restrictions. You are 45 minutes in, but one person dies. Oh well, better restart the whole mission, because you weren't aware of them, saved only recently, and now it's too late to send any units! The entire time during these missions, I was just thinking how some kind of ranking system would work wonders for this. You did it perfectly? S. You barely managed to save anybody and you were slow? E. I had to reset some missions so many times because of this. It didn't feel so needlessly annoying in the first game (if I remember correctly, that is). Simply, I wish the game would let me mess up, without putting a fail screen in front of me.

Another thing that is worse is the crowd control. It's just not as easy and simple to use now, as it was before and requires more clicks and fiddling, which can become really annoying, especially in busy areas and when not zoomed completely in.

Lastly, I also encountered some bugs, like vehicles getting stuck in tight spaces or on some objects and just staying stuck, missions not ending, non-translated text and crashes. (But then again, it's an old game, so the crashes might just be a consequence of that.)

In the end, I still think it is a pretty good and unique game, but some of those changes made me not enjoy Emergency 2 that much more than the first game. 

Overall rating: 75%

Playtime: 39h 58m

Played on PC.