[1001] Disaster Report

1001 No.60: ‘SOS: Final Escape / Disaster Report’ (PS2, 2003)

Now this is not a main­stream game in the slight­est. On first glance it looks like your stan­dard 3rd per­son PS2 clas­sic — but what are the bad guys? Terrorists? Aliens? Zombies? The answer is none of these (kinda). It’s your envi­ron­ment.

You know all those dis­as­ter movies, where some mas­sive cri­sis hits a city and every­one enters a strug­gle for sur­vival? Ever think that’d make a good game? Well some­one cer­tainly did, and that became ‘Disaster Report’ — or as it’s known in the UK for some rea­son, ‘SOS: Final Escape’.

You’re just a guy com­ing into your first day of a new job, on a new man-made island — when sud­denly an earth­quake strikes and chaos ensues. You miss the first res­cue chop­per, and so from then on you’re left to try and find safety within a con­stantly col­laps­ing city.

Whether it actu­ally does make a good game is another ques­tion. It is quite fun for the most part, and has some inter­est­ing mechan­ics — you can con­struct things to help you on your way, such as by com­bin­ing a hard-hat, torch and tape to make a head­lamp; and the reliance on water is a good way to keep you mov­ing — you have a ‘thirst’ level as well as a health meter.

There are some basic choices along the way that can dic­tate dif­fer­ent end­ings, but that would mean that you actu­ally care about the plot — which you won’t. As you might expect, there is some das­tardly con­spir­acy behind the dis­as­ter you’re caught up in — but it does all get rather silly. As it was orig­i­nally a Japanese game, the dia­logue and voice act­ing has been localised for English speak­ing coun­tries — but it’s pretty damn bad in places, and the con­trols are clunky as hell.

Like quite a few games I’ve come across so far in the 1001, this seems to be on the list mainly because it’s rather unique — and while it is pretty rough around the edges, it’s always good to see some­thing new.