Great German Game + Dumb USA Marketing = You Don't Know It's Emergency 4!
Yes, that's right. This game is not a new game, at all. It's what happens when marketing goes haywire, and causes the potential fan base of an 8.5 average game (that Gamespot covers right here, oddly!) to go "well, it's a year on, I guess we really won't ever see that game here".
I've actually been playing the original German release since 2006, and I will be the first person to say it; as an American, I find a lot of the structuring of emergency units hard to grasp at times, and I personally attribute that (with lousy marketing and the fact it was released when it was already 2 years old) to the 'flop' of the first game in the series to actually see a US Release, Emergency 3. Let's face it, we're used to the USA, where all of the cops have guns, all of the Ambulances are usually big, boxy affairs, and "light rescue" is a relatively normal part of a fire department. These sorts of 'omissions' don't make sense, until you remember the origins of this game - it is from Germany, and is based on the European standards for emergency response, particularly the UK model of policing, where only specially trained officers will carry a firearm, and a German model of Fire Response. I have no idea where they got the EMS structure from, honestly - we all know that over here, pretty much every member of an EMS crew is going to be at least an EMT. No one is a dedicated Stretcher Carrier.
So. With that said, and knowing what you're looking at, let's get into a bit more depth on the game itself.
First off, the game does feel and control a lot like an RTS. You have an overhead view of a 3d map, and pretty decent camera control to allow you to get the best vantage point of what is going on. It is worth noting that, unlike most RTS games, you can 'minimize' all aspects of your heads-up display (mini map, command bar, etc) to see more of what's going on - and there will be times when you will want to be able to see as much as possible. The only issues I've had to date are an inability to zoom OUT further, and issues with trying to put the camera 'past the edge of the map' to see events at the edge of the map clearly.
In the game, you control 4 branches of the Emergency Services; Fire, Medical, Police, and what I'll simply call "Other". These all should make relative sense - Fire is your fire department units, ranging from the simple fire engine to the rescue boat and "Fire Tank". Medical is ambulances, medivac helicopters, rescue dogs, etc. Police is everything from your average patrol cop to police helicopters. Other is things that just don't fit anywhere else, such as a mobile crane unit, an engineer (think calling out the electric or gas company to help handle a problem), a temporary bridge layer, etc. Not a lot fits in here, but what does go there is vital to know about.
The gist of the game is pretty straightforward; you will need to call in equipment and people to handle whatever is going wrong at a given moment. People only show up by vehicles, so you won't see a lone cop running into the area where your problem is, you will have to actually send a police car out with a cop in it. Once you have the right vehicles and people in place, you have to use them to handle the problem - have the cop redirect traffic away from the fire while you get your firemen to grab hoses and hook up to the hydrants nearby so that they can get that fire out while a few other firemen with breathing masks go in to get people out of the building and carry them clear of the smoke to where you parked your ambulances, with their attendant medical teams.
The last part of that probably told you something important - this game is all about rapid multi-tasking. You can't ignore anything for too long, or the problem will just get worse. Fire spreads, and it spreads QUICKLY. Injured people will continue to lose health until you get them to a medic. Traffic will keep coming, heedless of the danger ahead. You need to manage all of these things at once, and possibly a lot more than that. In fact, frequently, a lot more than that. And every mission you undertake in single-player is scored based on several factors - how fast you get the situation cleared up, if you stayed within budget, was there excessive casualties / injuries ... so you are always trying to manage the problems perfectly, and the first time you hit a mission, you will usually discover a few moments of "and it gets worse", where the designers seem to have decided to prove Murphy's Law for you.
So. Now you know the very basic basics of the game. Let's go into a few flaws I've found with it as well, while we're here.
#1 : In Campaign Mode, The game progresses as follows - Mission, "Mini-Freeplay", Mission, "Mini-Freeplay", etc. What this means to you is that you will undertake a static mission, such as a construction crane collapsing onto a building due to heavy rains, and then you will go 'into the city' to manage random events in the city until you've earned enough resources (yes, the town council pays you for every stroke victim or what-have-you you save) to pick up the new units you will need for the next mission in the lineup. Once you have completed a mission, you can go back and replay it at any time to try and improve your score. The downsides to this are simple - the missions themselves are only surprising once - once you know how to do it, it's simply a matter of knowing what you need, where you need it, and having it there right when you need it. You go from "Responding to the unknown and unpredictable" to "Amazing Kreskin, Fire Chief", getting units to the trouble spots with almost psychic powers! As a result, campaign mode really has low replay value in the missions, and the time-sink between the missions detracts from the fun.
#2 : In Freeplay Mode, you have -everything- at your disposal, and simply respond to random problems in your city on an as-needed basis. This is fun, interesting, and always a challenge, as you never know what will happen or when - you could have a traffic accident, a hostage taking, and an earthquake ... all within mere minutes of each other. There are no real flaws, per se, although it can get -very- difficult very fast, and the omission of some unit functions that would make sense in a city environment is confusing, until you remember that these functions can't really be separated from the single player mode. In at least one mod, which I will mention later, the mod maker had to pretty much disable functionality for single-player mode to make these oversights work when he added them.
#3 : The learning curve can be very steep, as there's times when this game ASSUMES you have a clue based on the previous ones (IE : Knowing that the police helicopter has a loudspeaker mounted on it that will allow it to order the evacuation of a building). A little looking around will usually clue you in as to what vehicle has what unique function you need to get something done, but it can be mildly to seriously frustrating to figure this out otherwise. This is made a bit worse by the fact that there's NO OBVIOUS CLUE that this game has another title, and a decent amount of on-line FAQ exists under that title.
It is worth noting that I have been unable to put the Multi-player function to the test, simply because I don't know anyone else who has it and who I can connect with. As a result, I have not taken the multi-player functions into account as being good or bad.
Now, for the HIDDEN VALUE ; there's a lot of mods already for Emergency 4. Most of them aren't in English, so those of us who don't speak the various languages they can be found in are left in the cold. There is, however, one "MUST GET" mod for this game. It's called the Los Angeles Mod (LA Mod for short). This is a full-game conversion, replacing (or at least re-skinning) all of the units, adding entirely new functions to them, and fully Americanizing the system into something that will make sense. I won't go into too much detail here, but 911 : First Responders + The LA Mod = extreme value on the money. I won't say much else, but a quick Google will let you see why I say this.
It's worth noting that I give 911 : First Responders itself a 7.5, but the addition of the Mod Utility, and a wide variety of available mods easily bumps the game up a full point. Averaging thse out gets the 8.0 I gave it.