City Crisis

Overview

City Crisis is an arcade/action, isometric style flight game with more emphasis on fun game play than realistic simulation. Physics comes into play as you delicately maneuver your copter to maintain your position as well as gingerly dangle rescue workers to grab survivors but the focus is clearly on fast arcade action. Time limits, point totals, "extinguishant missiles" and peculiar characters only add to the colorful and fun vibe of the visuals.  
 

Game Modes

Rescue presents four scenarios set around the game's fictional city where players manage time and ride capacity to put out all the pop-up fires they can while also keeping an eye out for random citizens in need. Hospital helipads are located around the city and when your chopper is full you'll have to unload before you can rescue anyone else. Extra extinguishant missiles are awarded for rescued citizens and general performance from one fire to another. At the end of each scenario you're graded on your time remaining, number of survivors, helicopter damage, and more. The final scenario, Accident Flight, unlocks the prototype 'Bat' copter.    Chase offers two simple scenarios where the player keeps a spotlight trained on a fleeing vehicle until the cops in the streets can corner them in. The first is a hijacked tour bus and the second is a runaway sports car. The last mode, final-resuce, features one scenario where the city has been hit by an earthquake and you're given 600 seconds to find and rescue 20 out of 30 possible survivors.  A Time Attack mode is included as well for efficiency-obsessed players and a Training mode explains the controls and how the game works. Finally there are Record archives to view high scores and some basic Options.

Helicopters 

Four helicopters are available in City Crisis, though the final prototype 'Bat' is locked until the final Rescue mission. 
 

• Dolphin: This is a good all around helicopter. Both boarding capacity and control are good.
• Gold Fish: This helicopter is for complicated rescues which depend on its small body and high maneuverability. It can turn on a dime, but can only hold a few survivors.
• Lobster: This helicopter has the best boarding capacity and highest durability, but is too large for many tight rescue areas.
• Bat: This prototype helicopter has great speed, rotation and a strong body, as well as an impressive boarding capacity but its size makes it a challenge to use in most rescue situations.

 

Peculiarities

City Crisis was amongst the earlier PlayStation 2 games to be released in the U.S. and as a result the spine of its packaging features no logo or title whatsoever. This is maddening to some people who constantly mistake it for Fantavision or any other early PlayStation 2 release. 
 
Though playable through backward compatibility on older PlayStation 3 models, some hitch in the emulation causes a generic helicopter sound to play at all times, even during loading screens.