Your vehicle is on fire – State of Emergency

[This is a guest post, for which I’m handing over once more to David C James, whose previous posts include Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted.]

In 2002 the gaming world was still reeling from the release of Grand Theft Auto III. Rockstar North’s monster hit pioneered open-world gameplay, combining wanton destruction, bloody violence and dark humor in an incredibly fun package. Six months on from its release the gaming audience was hungry for more in the same vein…

Enter VIS Entertainment’s State of Emergency. Glance at some screenshots and it looks a lot like GTA3, it promises hundreds of rioting NPCs, it’s being condemned by the moral majority and it’s published by Rockstar Games. Even today many people don’t understand the difference between a developer and a publisher, so for most in 2002 this was effectively the next game from the people who brought you GTA3. It rode this wave of hype to the top of the UK charts and sold an impressive 1.76 million copies.

Then people played it.

What they found was an insanely repetitive, needlessly difficult and incredibly frustrating slog. Over the last few weeks I’ve been grinding my way through it and what just-plain-sucked in 2002 is excruciating in 2020.

I will say one nice thing* about the game: it delivers on its promise of hundreds of on-screen characters. Sure up close they look like gouraud-shaded Final Fantasy VII refugees, but seeing a polygonal crowd running in all directions was something genuinely new in 2002. In fact, I strongly suspect that State of Emergency originated as a tech demo to test the number of characters a PlayStation 2 could render and then a game was built around it.

*okay, two nice things, as it has a 60hz widescreen mode.

The meat of the game lies in its ‘Revolution’ mode, in which you run around enclosed levels taking on short missions for underground resistance group ‘Freedom’. The aim is to bring down the imaginatively named ‘The Corporation’, which you do mainly by beating people to death and blowing stuff up.

There are roughly four types of mission: kill someone, destroy something, take a box from A to B and protect a target. The first three are basically fine as they at least lean into the game’s focus on dumb violence. It’s the last one where the pain comes. Escort missions are rarely fun even in the finest games, but in State of Emergency they’re as enjoyable as shoving red hot needles under your fingernails. The chaotic gameplay means it’s very hard to keep track of the guy you’re protecting, they can get beaten down by enemies very quickly and are susceptible to friendly fire. Mission failed.

Did I mention there’s a mind-numbing 175 of these missions to work through? Because oh boy there are. I was done with State of Emergency about mid-way through the first of its five levels but ground on through it as best I could to the perfunctory ending. This lack of content and creativity stamps out what little fun there is in the game and I’ll cop to resorting to the ‘skip this mission’ cheat to stop from gnawing the PS2 controller apart.

The game is slightly more enjoyable in the high score focused ‘Kaos’ mode, which plays like an ultraviolent spin on Crazy Taxi. But even though this story-free score attack mode ditches the worst aspects of the single-player campaign, doing the same thing over and over (and over) again wears thin fast.

Plus, while the last thing I want to do is wring my hands and get all offended, firing on an innocent crowd with high-powered weaponry has a very different feel in 2021 than in 2002. The game does have a anarchic anti-authoritarian plot but in the course of ‘liberating’ the citizenry you’re inevitably going to end up massacring thousands of them. State of Emergency is a forgotten PS2 relic so getting too worked up about it is silly, but the violent thrills no longer landing is just another example of how the game has aged badly.

The only way State of Emergency can be considered a success is in its tricksy marketing. Rockstar, in collaboration with the gaming press, were happy to bill this as the follow-up to Grand Theft Auto III. The tactic worked gangbusters and it getting to number one is why I’m writing about it now.

In every other respect State of Emergency deserves to be forgotten and – not to put too fine a point on it – is just absolute dogshit from start to finish. I need to start picking better games to write about…

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Top of the charts for week ending 2 March 2002:

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