iPhone Review: Emergency Dangerous: Fire Fighter
by Jennifer Allen
Publisher/Developer: Triple Play Co
Genre: Time Management
Price: $3.99
Verdict: Enjoyable time management game that will keep you playing till the end.
Pros: Great concept and easy to get into.
Cons:Music is irritating and a few bugs that need ironing out.
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a firefighter. It looked like the coolest job in the world. You got to drive in a huge red fire truck, shoot down a fire pole and rescue cats from trees. As I grew older, I found out that firefighters had to go in burning buildings where they could hardly see and suffer extreme temperatures, and possibly not make it out. I instantly decided that an office job would be much, much better for me. And so we come to the nearest that I will ever be a firefighter (unless you count the time I rescued a cat from a tree), and most likely the nearest you’ll ever get too: Emergency Dangerous: Fire Fighter on the iPhone.
Essentially, Fire Fighter is a time management game and if there’s one thing that an office job has taught me, it’s how to manage time effectively. Perfect for me then! Each level of Firefighter consists of moving your firefighters up and down a burning building to save people. You have four tools at hand: the ability to put out fires, the ability to smash doors open with an axe, you can provide first aid and you can rescue people. The trapped people are all hidden behind doors, some of these doors need to be smashed open with the axe, some need to have the fire put out that’s in front of them. Each firefighter can only do one thing at a time before returning to their start position. This is where the strategy comes into it. You have to plan accordingly to ensure the person gets saved as fast as possible. As time progresses, the health of the trapped person depletes meaning you have to hurry. There are twenty levels in all and a quite appropriate upgrade system on offer. At the start of the game, you only have a mere 2 firefighters to order around, and both of them are a bit slow and rubbish at putting out fires quickly. As you complete levels, you earn points. Those points can then be used to buy various upgrades. You can buy more firefighters, faster run speed thanks to new boots, a better hose meaning fires are extinguished faster. You get the idea. By the end of the game, you can be a quite elite force of firefighters. Of course, the game also ramps up the difficulty by the end too. Rather than having 3 or 4 people to save, you have 25 or more and the action gets quite frantic. However it’s all very well paced so the action never feels too frantic. The first level provides a great tutorial and then future levels gradually increase the difficulty, meaning you should be perfectly able to finish the latter levels by the time you reach them.
I found Fire Fighter pretty addictive. The levels never take too long to complete so progression is always steady. Offering an upgrade system also encouraged me to go back to earlier levels to improve my performance. Each level completion, you are awarded a trophy. The best type being gold. So any time that I finished a level with a silver trophy, I would return once I had a few upgrades under my belt. The game offers achievements or trophies, as seen on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and although there’s no visible way of showing them off to other people, it’s strangely satisfying to have that accomplishment awarded to you. Things aren’t all perfect in the Emergency Dangerous world however. I found that the game sometimes inexplicably crashed upon loading, as well as that it would show an error stating a cut scene format was not supported on the iPhone although it appears this is a known bug. I also found the music got annoying very quickly so it became one of the few iPhone games that I switched to silent mode for. However despite these irritants, I really enjoyed Emergency Dangerous: Fire Fighter, even despite its somewhat silly name. At $3.99 it might not be an impulse buy, but it really is good fun and seems like the sort of game I will be returning back to often.
