I've played all games in Emergency series and this one is pretty good one. Graphics are a bit outdated, but gameplay is still great and difficult. Buy it if you like RTSes like that.

Interesting premise but in reality it is very difficult to manage all the various activities going on around the gameworld, making this a somewhat frustrating game to play.

Emergency 3 is a great game. With it's open modability and unique gameplay style that allows for various types of units that are really beyond the scope of it's European origin.

You control teams of Police, Firefighters, EMTs, and technical services to help deal with various emergencies as they show up. You typically end up with missions that are more focused in nature such as a unique building fire, then after a few of those you end up in a bit of a free-form map to help earn enough credit to continue on.

The one thing that is really difficult to get used to that it's successor improved upon was the UI. Controls are award and require you to be quite explicit when trying to get a unit to do something. Context-sensitive controls are pretty minimal if even available at all, and while that will be awkward at first for most users, it grows on you and you can continue just fine.

Emergency 3 and it's successor Emergency 4 (911: First Responders) are great titles for this niche type of gameplay and the modding community is there to give you nearly endless replayability.

I've never played an Emergency game before, but this game has brought me hours of fun since I purchased it, the "Never Ending" mode is also awesome, but the campaign missions are great too.

My first Emergency game I played was Emergency 4, or here in North America it's known as "911: First Responders", it was and still is the best RTS/Simulation game I've yet to play. I decided to trace back, so I bought Emergency 3, and just like Emergency 4, the game is solid and fun. You take control of a team of Emergency Services Personnel (Police, Fire, Ambulance, Technical) and have to race to rescue people, arrest perpetrators, take control of chaotic situations, and prevent tragedies from happening. I highly recommend this game for any level of RTS and Simulation gamer.

this game is fun to play when you have a bit of free time. the game interesting and fun to lay there is a free world so after you beat the game or before you do you can just mess around.

This is not a terrible game but it is definitely a tense and frustrating one. In principle, the game mechanics are fairly simple. Use firefighters to stop fires, medics to save the injured and police to control people. Sounds simple right? Well its not. The three teams each have different amount of vehicles, equipment and personnel. How to use them its up to you and your creativity because the game does not help you at all.

Based on the tutorial and the first few missions you can get the hang of the basics pretty quickly. Of course this just covers a small part of the game. On later missions things get complicated and pretty hectic. This is all aggravated by the fact that you must micromanage every vehicle, equipment or unit. Actually saying that you have to micromanage is a huge understatement because sometime you must even point the unit in the exact direction you need them to so they can work properly. For example police officers have no yellow tape to keep bystanders away, instead they just hold their arms horizontally so that the people that are standing in front will walk away (not the ones behind). Now I don't know if this is actually done in some countries (I believe the game is from Germany) but it is so retarded. Why not just tell your police units to evacuate the area, maybe even placing tape around an area but in an automatic manner. The game fails in wanting you to do absolutely everything so it just stops being fun an more of a chore.

This micromanaging makes further missions almost impossible as they increase both in complexity and in size. I also had to use a walk-through from about mission 11 because the game fails to be clear on your objectives and in how each unit works. A manual or an in depth tutorial are very needed in this game. Will this make the game winnable? No, but it will make it just a tad less frustrating.

Now besides the terrible micromanaging and difficulty level the game is not that bad. The graphics are nice, sounds and music add to the atmosphere and the concept is something rarely done. However, it is not a game for everyone but, if you are a control freak and like to micromanage every single detail then you might consider this game.

Loved this game from start to finish. The detail isn't all that fantastic, but it has everything that a decent game should have. Alot of interactivity, which gives the player alot of freedom. Your are given a number of tasks within each level to complete. There are 20 levels overall. Very enjoyable game. 8/10

I picked up Emergency 3 because I’d been looking at a different title with the same sort of game play and it sounded appealing to me. As an older title, and based on the screen shots here, I wasn’t assuming the most.

I was very happily surprised by this game. The graphics are much nicer then the screens here would lead you to expect, the game play is fun, often a bit tense, sometimes exacerbating, but all around pretty solid. It requires a lot of the same thinking and on your feet quick responses that many of the more traditional RTS titles would provide, but with a totally different dynamic and goal set, as well as a complete different mentality during a mission. At this point in the game play, I’ve actually found myself concerned in fairly real ways about developments mid mission…. For example, if combating a fire, you may very well have cut away some trees near a burning structure, but you don’t ever know if you’ve cut back enough, or if the fire is going to progress in a different direction then you had expected.

So far the biggest con’s I’ve encountered are some of the UI features, and a few mechanical decisions on the game designer’s part. In the case of the UI my big grip is that it is difficult to get all the personnel associated with a particular response unit up and running doing the task that you want them too. There aren’t a lot of good keystroke options I can see to hotkey things. Mechanically, this problem is compound by the way task assignment works. You have to set up the personnel to do a given job by ordering them to the equipment carrying unit, have them select the equipment to use, then go do their job, sometimes, such as in the base of burning trees, you might have to micromanage here to get good effects too. Another mechanical issue that wears on you is vehicle deployment. When a piece of rescue equipment is deployed, it enters the map VERY VERY FAR away from the action. You get three hot buttoned locations, and you will quickly discover you are using one of them for the entry area of the vehicles so you can get them to the action quickly. Once there if you want to do things like deploy them in a specific orientation, to do things like use flood lamps, they often seem to needlessly turn around.

Cons considered, I still gave this game 5 stars. For the price, it’s a really fun time, it has an endless play mode, built in mod support, and a novel game concept. The graphics are really pretty good for the age of the game, it runs well on low end machines (I have it installed on my budget laptop), and is DMR free so you don’t have to mess with all that junk. In some ways, the cons actually help the game play so far, as they make you feel like you are on site, managing the crisis, and they keep the tension high. I wouldn’t pass up on this game if the game premise sounds remotely appealing to you!