Rosco McQueen: Firefighter Extreme is part of a new wave of kinder, gentler games (more than one of which is about fighting fires) in which life is to be saved and not destroyed. It's also a decent but fairly predictable 3D adventure game/shooter, where the shooting is done with a fire hose instead of a rocket launcher.
With ax and portable water system in hand, and a weird hovering robo-buddy tagging along, you enter the not-yet-burning building. Inside you'll find hapless humans to rescue and pesky pink robots to extinguish. Keeping with the game's soft focus, none of your foes are living (so there's no "killing"), and cuteness abounds. Power-ups include milk and Evian-shaped bottles of water to replenish your supply. There're also bouncy laundry baskets and ironing boards to superjump on. It's all very child-safe. If I'm not mistaken, I actually heard the voice-over of Rosco exclaim a la Ned Flanders, "Ah, God's precious water."
Most times, when you first enter a room, nothing is on fire. Don't crack that Welch's Grape yet though; your robot foes have an endless supply of bombs to drop that set the place ablaze. (Actually, fires are usually contained to the minimalist-sculpture-looking piles of boxes that litter each level, but if they burn long enough, you lose, so....) As long as they're "alive" you can extinguish as many small fires as you want; they'll make more. It doesn't take long to notice the game-winning pattern: enter room, kill robots, extinguish fires, then save folks and trip security switches, and so on. This is the game's biggest flaw. After about a half hour, you've got it down. Sure, new design elements, power-ups, and so forth are introduced as you push on, but the fundamental play patterns are predictable and static.
Control is of the standard over-the-shoulder rotate/strafe/move-forward variety. Your trusty ax is used both to break down doors and crush evil robots, and power-ups are available that allow you to, well, break down heavier doors. There's also a jump button and a hose button. In general, control is fairly tight, but, as with most 3D adventure games, rotation feels a little different from the last one you played and requires some getting used to. Hit detection is decent, although I'm still not convinced I missed as many chops as it says I did.
Rosco is a good enough looking game. What's not to like about robots that look like extras from Disney's The Black Hole? The flames are pretty, but nothing compared with the complex fire patterns of DreamWorks Interactive's Skullmonkeys, nor do they act as light sources. Soundwise, the continual vocal prompting is repetitive but useful (for example, "Water's low," and "Ooh, I detected a hotspot, Rosco; check the map"), but much of the soundtrack is irritating, especially the overabundance of Asian musical motifs in the laundry room levels of the game. That's just plain dumb.
In all, Rosco McQueen Firefighter Extreme is a good game for parents looking for less violent fare for their kids. A lot of the game's shortcomings, like its repetitive gameplay patterns, might not trouble the young ones nearly as much as the rest of us, for whom this one warrants a rental at best.
