Emergency Mayhem

Gameplay

The game is based around the three main emergency services (fire, police and emergency medical services). The player must drive to the destination as quickly as possible. There's a minigame at the end of each level, which is based around defusing the situation. These minigames use the Wii Remote's motion sensing. These minigames include administering CPR, disarming bombs, wrangling escaped zoo animals, among others.

Development

Emergency Mayhem was announced for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo, published by Acclaim Entertainment and developed by their Cheltenham studio. However, the game was canceled when Acclaim Entertainment filed for bankruptcy in September 2004. In May 2007, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment purchased the rights to the game. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced the game would be released for the Wii and they would publish the game, while Codemasters would develop the game. Then, in December of the same year, Codemasters announced they had taken over the publishing rights, and Supersonic Software took on developing the game. Codemasters also announced that the game would be released in the second quarter of 2008.

Reception

The game has generally been received negative. GameSpot gave the game a 2.5/10 and criticized the game for its lack of variety, "wildly uneven difficulty" said that some minigames have "overly sensitive controls" while "others are completely unresponsive". IGN gave the game a 5.0/10 and thought that the graphics were "generic and dated" and the gameplay was "Fun, but shallow and repetitive. And there's nothing besides the gimmicky minis that hasn't already been done by Crazy Taxi". They praised it for having "fitting music" and "60 frames at all time".

Awards

GameSpot nominated Emergency Mayhem for the dubious award of Flat-Out Worst Game in its 2008 video game awards.