Emergency 2012

Emergency 2012 is the fourth sequel of Emergency: Fighters for Life. Like the previous installments it is a real-time strategy game, focusing on a selection of emergency institutions. This encompasses handling of fire department, police, medical rescue services, and technical relief units.

The game features a campaign and a free play mode: * The campaign consists of 12 unique missions, each representing a fictive catastrophe scenario. Though each mission has a rather linear plot, triggered by certain events, the players performance has major impact on how and when single objectives are accomplished. Every scenario has a unique map. The available emergency forces are preset for each mission and accessible from the start.

• In free play, the player may choose from three maps featuring a specific weather condition of storm, heat wave, or cold wave. Opposing the campaign mode the player occupies an all-in-one emergency base housing all four unit divisions. The player starts with a limited vehicle fleet and may buy additional and more specialized units during the game. The objectives are randomly generated casual incidents on varying locations on the map.

The fire department takes the main part of activities, being involved in any kind of fire incidents, traffic accidents and a variety of rescue operations. Fire fighting activities range from burning garbage bins to full fledged fire blazes running through the neighborhood. Police has to cope with traffic jams, pickpockets, bank robberies, even sniper attacks and a lot in between. Medical rescue services and technical relief units take rather supportive parts. The former are limited to reanimation and transport duties. The latter are needed to clean up the mess on-site and for special technical tasks.

The game requires a lot of micromanagement. Especially in free-play, the player will have to choose the appropriate vehicles for the pending incident and may even have to modify the crew. On-site, the player must let the crews get off their vehicles first and then typically have to equip them with specific gear for the situation found. After that the units have very limited capabilities of autonomous initiative, such as coping with the next fire or reanimating victims within reach.