KMGR of "Firefighters: City Rescue"

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Firefighters: City Rescue is a cute little platform game where you play a firefighter and go up against multi-story fires. While it is sort of fun, it soon gets repetitive and later impossible as the game basically cheats by reacting to your moves.

The rules of the game is simple. A building is on fire. As the "captain" of the fire district, you lead your crew in from the bottom floor. You need to make your way through every level, all the way to the top, put out the main flame, and rescue all civilians along the way. Sounds easy, except a lot of things: floors can burn through, other things can burst into flames, a "fire monster" can burn you down (you have 5 lives, after which you lose the crew, and you only got three of those for the career). Your fire extinguisher can also run out, and you don't know how much is left! You can summon support from your crew like "get me a new floor" or "get me more fire extinguisher", and they may even fight a fire or two with you, but support is a limited quantity as well.

So what you're left with is a basic platform game with the fire in place of the "bad guy". You can extinguish the fire by using the fire extinguisher on it (except the smallest, those you can just step on. However, it's hard to tell the size of the fire in a hurry. You can carry a civilian to safety, and civilians will try to run from fire, but they can perish, and they can only be rescued by physically picking them up, carrying them to the left side of building, where they're automatically dropped onto the ladder truck.

That leaves the "fire monster", which periodically spawns from the mother fire on the roof. The fire monster moves from level to level, occasionally leaving kindling in its wake, which may or may not burn into a larger flame. Unextinguished fires will get bigger and eventually eat through the floor, which can only then be spanned by calling in support, whom will drop a replacement floor. And yes, one can drop through a burned-through floor. The firemonster can be fought two ways: you can jump it when it comes through, or you can spray it with fire extinguisher, which will force it to bounce back. Do that twice and it's "dead". However, it will soon respawn, depending on difficulty level. What you definitely don't want is get caught by the firemonster near a stairwell, as you can neither jump or fight it with the extinguisher then.

You start in the city rather normal and calm, then fire reports started coming in, and as time goes on more and more fires are spotted, in various sizes of buildings, with more or less civilians, faster or slower respawn of firemonster, and so on.

The problem with this game is it gets repetitive. Most games in advanced levels introduced new variations, new mechanics, and so on. This one just makes the level longer and more tedious, with same amount of lives.

Graphically it's okay, a bit cartoonish but okay. Sound is lousy.

Overall, Firefighters: City Rescue just doesn't match up to a real platform game. The only thing going for it is its "theme", and the lack of gameplay can't make up for it.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: firefighting game? Haven't seen those in a while
Cons: not much in the game, no new wrinkles/variations