I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.
The Emergency series turns the basic premise of RTS games on its head. Whereas most are about pitting one army against another, Emergency makes you an emergency response coordinator, and your enemy is the emergency. Sometimes that involves criminal elements, but most of the time it’s a fire, or vehicle accident, or what have you. It’s a great take on the gung-ho macho genre that downplays the violence.
The fact that the antagonist is a set of preprogrammed events rather than a strategic player or AI makes Emergency feel more like a puzzle game. You have four sets of units you can deploy (I think of them as suits in a deck of cards): fire (fire and rescues), medical (healing), police (criminals and crowd control), and technical (obstructions, electrical faults, burst pipes, and bomb disposal). The tasks that each suit handles overlap, creating resolution sequences. For instance, you need to remove an obstruction before you can extricate trapped people and then heal them. Each event has an optimal order of resolution, or a few alternative approaches, depending on your priorities. Events pop up one after another across one of four maps in the city of the game (Downtown, Laborton, Countryside, and Industrial Port), each with its own environmental characteristics and flavor of events. And there’s a ticking clock in the form of a chaos meter: each task adds a set amount of chaos per second, while resolving tasks and events reduces chaos. If you hit 100%, you go into overtime, and if you can’t reduce your chaos before that time runs out, it’s game over. There’s also a thirty-minute master clock, but I’ve only ever seen it run out once. Conversely, you win when you resolve all the events for a given outing, or mission (the game tells you in advance how many there are, but not what or where). A different weather pattern for each mission complicates things: heat and wind aggravate fires, rain worsens electricity failures, fog slows down your units, and blizzards momentarily and randomly incapacitate them.
The 2023 installment, originally subtitled “Free to Play,” adds a few twists that befit the FTP genre. Events move much faster: fires start and spread quickly, criminals injure bystanders, and the injured deteriorate faster. You can only deploy five units at a time, with a cooldown period (CD) after sending one away, and most events require more than five units. It’s not pay-to-play – I haven’t spent a cent – but more difficult missions require spending in-game credits to upgrade unit stats (basically every action has its own stat) and equippable special ability cards that make tasks resolve faster or act as super-upgrades. You can only equip three cards per mission, in addition to a global card that applies to all players, especially handy for multiplayer (more on that below) – global cards affect the entire map, reducing fires, adding a unit slot for each player, and other effects. There are also three in-game cards you can use in a pinch: to reduce chaos, double all unit efficiency, or resolve a specific task.
I know this all sounds a bit abstract, so here‘s a video of me playing. As you can see, it can get very fast-paced, especially with that background music; the gameplay experience is different enough from previous installments as to have angered series veterans. The adrenaline rush is one source of its addictiveness, and I imagine that real first responders can feel similarly, as seen in The Hurt Locker (2008) and the book from which it takes its epigraph, Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Every task has a progress bar that decreases as you deal with it; there are the chaos meter, master clock, overtime clock, and CD timer; and even when moving vehicles from one event to another, the game displays how much distance is left to cover. The whole game is geared toward task, event, and mission resolution, so each thing finished brings a dopamine hit. You don’t even have to feel guilty about the symbolism of the game, because you’re helping to save lives.
I have an easily addicted personality, and it’s not the first time I’ve found myself unable to tear myself away from a videogame. Each time, I succeeded when I realized that I’d started grinding for external goods like credits instead of enjoying the game itself. But what if “the game itself” is just one long series of dopamine hits?
And what if that do-good feeling of saving lives were amplified by a multiplayer mode that’s cooperative rather than zero-sum? Emergency allows you to play a mission with up to three other players; you can form a party, or let the game match players according to experience level. To counteract the benefits of being able to cumulatively deploy more than five units at a time, multiplayer missions have more events, sometimes three times more, and the CD timer is longer as well. The key to a good multiplayer mission is division of labor: if you stick to only one suit of units, you can avoid the longer CD times by moving them around the map from one event to the next, as well as optimize your special ability cards to give your units three enhancements instead of just one. Solving urgent time-based puzzles by working together with random teammates, some of whom don’t even speak your language (there are a good many Mainland Chinese users), is an incredible feeling.
To be sure, to succeed at the harder missions, you still need to grind for credits and special ability cards. That’s where the game’s last dopamine-trap mechanism kicks in: daily and weekly tasks that, on completion, reward you with credits and other stuff. These ask you to resolve tasks slightly differently, such as by not allowing you to deploy the heavily armed SWAT units when dealing with armed criminals, or asking you to rescue people from burning buildings before they get injured.
Everything adds up to make sure that you – meaning I – keep playing day after day, be it for the dopamine quick hits or to resolve those daily tasks. Even if you’re not the type of player to grind, even if you’re the type of player who plays Grand Theft Auto (1997–) like it’s Second Life (2003), Emergency may still appeal to you because, despite the hectic task-oriented pace, the city itself is rendered with alluring detail, which you can enjoy by rotating the camera 360 degrees and zooming in or out. The weather patterns impact not just your units but also the environmental aesthetics. Buildings aren’t just burning blocks but well-designed creations. There are cars in the streets, people on the sidewalks, and ships in the near waters. Even the parks and the Countryside map feature detailed flora and sparkling rivers. I would be willing to pay for a map with no missions just so I can hang out and explore these lovingly crafted details.
God help me.
– CJ Sheu has a PhD in contemporary American fiction from National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei. He also writes about films and film reviews on the side, and has been published in Bright Wall/Dark Room and Funscreen (Taiwan). Check out his blog reviewfilmreview.wordpress.com/about, or hit him up on X/Twitter @cj_sheu. 
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