Disaster Day of Crisis

Day of Crisis is all about one man’s run of very bad luck. While trying to rescue a friend’s daughter from evil kidnappers, a series of natural disasters strike the city and he finds himself caught up in earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanoes.

Not content with covering one genre, Day of Crisis mixes up several styles into a melting point of gaming madness. One moment you’re running through a city as it’s wrecked by a tsunami, trying desperately to escape the disaster, next you’ve pulled someone out the rubble and are performing a combination of button presses to revive them or perform medical procedures.

Then a bunch of gun-toting bad guys appear and you’re being asked to shoot them in an on-rails section that bears a similarity to Playstation classic Time Crisis, pointing the Wii controller like a gun. After that, it’s time to hop in a car and navigate your way through the destruction, and then there’s a bit of adventure puzzling.

It’s the very definition of a mixed bag, in several ways. The shooting sections are a lot of fun, and running away from the destruction and rescuing hapless pedestrians is enjoyable too, but the driving tends to be annoying as you suddenly run into unavoidable obstacles and have to start again from the last checkpoint.

It also becomes slightly repetitive later on despite the vast number of genres the game covers, and occasionally the third person controls can be fiddly.

Making up for all this though is the sheer charm and humour of a game that is deliberately over the top and very cheesy. The dialogue is atrocious, the cut scenes almost embarrassing and the constant disasters becomes funnier as the game goes on.

Verdict: 65%

Its controls are wonky, the graphics swing between beautiful and extremely ugly and it can’t make up its mind about what kind of game it is, but Day of Crisis manages to be bundles of fun anyway, providing you can put up with its cheesy plot and numerous flaws.