State of Emergency 2

This is one of those games when you're looking to blow off some steam or feel the need for some senseless violence, you can run to your local game rental shop and pick up for the weekend.

DC Studios deserves a pat on the back for at least bringing the game up to the level that the original should have been. That doesn't mean they made a great game, but it's certainly good enough to be entertaining for the window of, say, a rental.

State of Emergency 2 isn’t a good game, but it does what it is billed to do and I can’t fault it too strongly because of that.

Playing through State of Emergency 2 is a lot like watching a decent actor try to produce a real performance in a straight-to-video horror movie. [Apr 2006, p.122]

A good way to kill some time and is worth giving it a run for its money.

Although there's an attempt to get everyone involved in the action - via a very basic command system - it really just feels like a third-person shooter full of headless chickens. [June 2006, p.80]

Emergency 2's narcoleptic gameplay serves as the ultimate pacifier. [Apr 2006, p.101]

The frustrating ease of death, an uninteresting story and characters, washed-out visuals and uninspired gameplay do not a successful sequel make.

The control is good, but there is no jump or evasive maneuvers making SOE 2 an altogether innocuous, all too familier assault. [Apr 2006, p.62]

A mediocre game. It doesn't really do anything entirely wrong, per se (aside from the terrible AI), but it doesn't do anything that a million other action games haven't already done much better.

State of Emergency 2 outright sucks. This is a game so weak in execution, bland, repetitively constructed and poorly balanced that one wonders how it made it out of testing alive.

State of Emergency 2 replaces the first game's ultraviolent and fancy-free nature with a cavalcade of lame trial-and-error-based missions, a lousy plotline, and dated technology.

This game belongs back in the era when it was acceptable for a game's storyline to be summed up by "The president has been kidnapped by ninjas". The graphics are decent, but just about everything else is outdated, clichéd, or deeply flawed.

At least it's not as purely unbearable as the first, packing a few neat ideas like the ability to use vehicles to mow down enemies and the balancing between different freedom fighters in your crew.

State of Emergency is messier than the day after a riot. New gamers will be turned off by the trial and error game play while fans of the original won't recognize this mission-based sequel. Either way, just avoid this completely average PlayStation 2 game!

But returning with an action shooting game that everyone's seen before dozens of times and better too doesn't work. It hasn't worked so well before when others have done it and it certainly doesn't work now when State of Emergency 2 does a half-assed job at thinking it can be better by renovating what made the first game so special: its rioting.

The animation is jerky and robotic. The dialog is juvenile but the voiceacting is some of the worst I've heard. The director must have been sick that day and let the non-English-speaking cleaning lady handle voiceover recordings.

The disc doesn't do anything that every other third-person action game on the market does better.

The gameplay changes, ludicrous storyline, clunky controls and horrible presentation, however, may have polarized the game’s potential audience.

Nothing in SoE2 is more than mediocre, except perhaps its profanity count. [May 2006, p.75]

The game's multiplayer and arcade modes are both valiant attempts at providing replayability, but neither are varied or deep enough to keep anyone but the most frantically bored or underexposed gamer entertained for longer than five minutes.

Even at $29.99 and with an arcade mode that might keep you amused for five or ten minutes, State of Emergency 2 feels simultaneously stale and awkward. It isn't complete trash, but it is too aggravating and unimaginative to be worth more than a Friday night rental.

There are just too many flaws within the good ideas they had. There isn’t enough lasting appeal, or any real excitement, to recommend this one to anybody.

Without an auto- targeting feature, this game is so challenging that you’ll be hurling your controller to the floor in no time.

State of Emergency 2 deserves a spot right next to 25 To Life, 187: Ride or Die, and Final Fight Streetwise as another title that's an urban nightmare for all the wrong reasons. Stop buying them, and hopefully they'll go away.

Flaws like this keep State of Emergency 2 from being anything more than a straightforward third-person shooting gallery. [Jun 2006, p.92]

A terrible shooter that does nothing new and does it badly. Bereft of reason to exist, don't even let this cross your path, let alone buy it. [June 2006, p.69]

Wildly derivative and senselessly exploitative, SOE2 neither challenges nor entertains. Thug gaming at the very lowest level. [May 2006, p.81]

When blood effects are one of the chief highlights of a game, you know there may be something wrong. Not even the multiplayer, which suffers from the same issues of control and additional problems of slowdown, can save this sinking ship.

From instantly spawning enemies, to their mindless A.I., to control that misses its mark, State of Emergency 2 is a study in bad developmental decisions.

The most striking thing about SOE2 is its tragic pointlessness. As a sequel in a franchise that is almost entirely unloved, in a world where there are countless games which do any part of this game better, it's sad to think that a group of people developed it, because then we'd have to blame them for putting out such a diabolical piece of cack.

It's just a veil of mediocrity used to cover what amounts to a crazed-crowd simulator. No, wait, that actually sounds too fun for a game like this. [Jun 2006, p.92]

There's an arcade mode, which is identical to the main one but with a level select, as well as a multiplayer mode, but my friends would all get horribly offended if I asked them to play this.

I would rather be subjected to a week long insurance seminar with Enya music in the background than play this game again, ever.