State of Emergency Updated Preview

Rockstar Games has slowly but steadily carved out a niche by creating games that balance strong sales with edgier content. Smuggler's Run, Smuggler's Run 2, Midnight Club, and, most recently, Grand Theft Auto III have proven that the company has a knack for making engaging games with topics that are less than mass-market friendly. Its latest title, State of Emergency, is no exception, placing you in the middle of a riot. A few years ago, a game featuring such a concept would most likely be half-baked, relying on shock value alone to draw sales, but State of Emergency manages to present a strong vision that blends innovation and the inspired mayhem of some arcade classics.

The game's story is set in an Orwellian vision of the future in which a monolithic entity known as the Corporation is in control of the sprawling metropolis known as Capital City. Trouble begins to brew when the Corporation begins dabbling in mind control and imposing martial law. The citizens start to organize into resistance groups when those opposed to the Corporation are "dealt with" by less-than-gentle Corporation troops. You assume the role of one of the resistance fighters, who are all motivated by their own personal beefs against the Corporation and are determined to bring it down.

You'll eventually be able to control one of five resistance fighters in the game. You'll initially have access to Roy MacNeil, aka Mack, a disgruntled ex-cop who rebelled against the Corporation's brutal enforcement methods, and Anna Price, aka Libra, a lawyer whom the Corporation pressured to sell her clients out. As you progress through the game, you'll unlock Hector Soldado, aka Spanky, a charismatic ex-gang member tired of the Corporation's treatment of the innocent people in the city; Eddy Raymonds, aka Bull, an ex-sports star who refused to participate in Corporation-sponsored match fixing; and Ricky Trang, aka Phreak, who was orphaned in high school when his parents were arrested as political dissidents by Corporation security. Each character will handle a bit differently based on size and abilities. For example, Libra is one of the swiftest of the bunch, although her power doesn't match that of the larger and slower Bull.

You'll find two main modes in the game, revolution and chaos. Revolution is the game's "story" mode, and it has you settling your selected character's beef with the Corporation by completing a variety of missions. As you complete missions, you'll make your way through the game's four areas, which are broken into varied chunks. The game flows fairly straightforwardly--you'll simply meet up with a fellow resistance member, and he or she will present you with a task. The missions themselves are deceptively simple, requiring you to deliver an item, escort someone to a location so he or she can destroy it, or destroy a building on your own. Onscreen arrows and colored cursors will help you keep track of important structures and characters. You'll quickly discover that the key to success lies in making it through the masses of people while avoiding the hordes of Corporation guards and the street gangs. All told, you'll go through 175 missions with all the characters in the game.

State of Emergency's other mode, chaos, is aptly named, as it features two game types that offer a frenetic gameplay pace that calls to mind the insanity of Smash TV. Only one of the types--kaos--will be open initially. In that type, you'll begin with "fixed time three minutes," which gives you three minutes to race through one of the game's levels and raise as much hell and earn as many points as possible. If you score enough points, you'll unlock "fixed time five minutes," which gives you a bit more time to wreak havoc. Your last reward for skilled playing in this game type is "unlimited," which lets you run amok until your heart is content. The second game type--last man standing--challenges you to take out a mob of 200 people as quickly as possible. If you take them out quickly enough, you'll be able to access a timed version of last man standing that requires you to trim down a mob of people in a set amount of time. You'll find unlocking every option in the chaos mode will hone your rioting skills to perfection, as you'll have to unlock each of the different game types on every stage in the game.

Controlling your virtual rioter is a breeze thanks to an elegant control scheme that's mayhem-friendly. You'll move your player with the left analog stick and control the camera with the right analog stick. You'll pick up items with the circle button. The X button will perform physical attacks, fire weapons, and throw held items. The square button will unleash a kick or allow you to beat your foes with held items ranging from signs to dismembered limbs. The triangle button will perform your character's individual special attacks. The L1 trigger will center the camera, and you'll use the R2 trigger to dash. The setup is intuitive enough that you'll be tearing through the masses like a pro after only a few minutes of getting acquainted with it

The game itself is an addictive mix of play styles. The revolution mode requires a slightly more thoughtful style of play, as the missions will require you to be aware of your surroundings and potential threats to you or your charges. Taking a page from GTAIII, the game will offer visual cues to warn you of impending trouble. Just as the number of stars in GTAIII alerted you to your "wanted" status, the number of skull icons above Corporation forces will clue you in on how great a threat they'll pose to you. That's not to say that you won't be doing your fair share of rioting in this mode--you'll still have ample opportunity to stir up a ruckus, but as the game ramps up its difficulty, you'll have to be a bit more careful. Chaos mode, on the other hand, is insanity in its purest form. You may find the anarchy a bit disconcerting at first, as there hasn't really been a game lately that's let you run amok without consequences. Today's crop of console games, even GTAIII, don't really encourage mindless mayhem and have started to breed it out of gamers. Your biggest concern in kaos mode will be maximizing the amount of damage you can do with any given weapon--of which they are many. Rocket launchers, flamethrowers, Uzis, shotguns, grenade launchers, and even dismembered body parts such as arms and heads are all available for use in destroying everything around you. The item placement is balanced well enough that you'll happen upon fresh weapons during a rampage just as your current one runs out of ammo. In addition, health and time extension powers ups will be present to help you extend your runs in the timed modes. You'll come to find that the path to success in this frenetic mode lies in awakening long dormant Smash TV, Rampage, Robotron, or even rusty Quake skills.

Complementing State of Emergency's frantic gameplay is its impressive presentation. Featuring an excellent marriage of graphics and sound, the game manages to effectively convey the atmosphere of a virtual riot. SOE's robust custom graphics engine is a testament to both the impressive skill of the Vis coders and the power of the PlayStation 2 hardware. Making use of the system's vector units, the game is able to free up the bulk of the CPU's resources. The PS2 CPU will focus the bulk of its resources, roughly 65 percent, on character AI, which allows for their realistic reactions to your behavior in the game. The game's character renderer, written in Assembly, was designed to have VU1 handle the up to 200 characters the game can display. Character detail varies--for example, principal characters are "skinned" and made up of 28 segmented parts showcasing a solid amount of polygons, while NPCs feature more simplistic modeling. The detail levels are well masked by three different levels of detail, stylized art design, and the game's frenetic pace. You'll find the game's areas to be large, detailed environments, featuring a wealth of deformable structures. Building facades can be destroyed, windows can be shattered, and cars can be blown up. Objects such as signs and benches can be picked up and used in combat, either as projectiles or blunt objects to beat someone senseless. The frame rate stays at a smooth 30 frames per second for the most part, despite the growing insanity onscreen.

The game's sound contributes to your playing experience thanks to a wide variety of samples that are layered to create an immersive audio environment. All the characters and areas in the game will feature their own unique sounds. An event modeler will change the pitch and sequence of sounds to allow for a host of variations on a single sound sample. The in-game music is currently an unobtrusive collection of beats that sells the game's tone.

While the game's subject matter and story aspects may come across as a bit too intense, you'll find a dark sense of humor permeating the game. One part Looney Tunes and one part Evil Dead, State of Emergency never takes itself too seriously. The game features cartoonish characters exhibiting outlandish behavior, and it's hard not to laugh as you race through the streets, beating people with a severed arm or human head. Once we let go of our careful, ammo-conserving ways, we found ourselves hooked on the game's inspired mayhem. There's just nothing like a little virtual mayhem after a long day of work. State of Emergency ships this January for the PlayStation 2.