Disaster Report (PS2)

Back when I first took an in-depth look at an exceptionally bad video game with my Disaster Report review style, it didn’t occur to me that one day I would be looking at a game actually called Disaster Report. While I would have personally loved for things to line up to give us a Disaster Report on Disaster Report, it just wasn’t meant to be.

Disaster Report, the game that is, begins with a reporter named Keith arriving on Stiver Island, a city artificially constructed out at sea that, despite the concept behind it, still looks and feels very much like a regular large urban area rather than a science fiction civilization. The day Keith arrives though is a fateful one, as an enormous earthquake hits the island, and despite the island supposedly being constructed to handle such disasters, the whole place begins to fall apart. Keith must now escape an island he just arrived on, but rescue won’t be so easy as parts of the island crumble away, the city atop it has its skyscrapers falling, and the island is being slowly submerged into the ocean. As he looks for a way off Stiver Island, Keith gradually learns more and more about the truth behind why the island is falling apart so terribly. In many ways this plot feels like a faithful transition of the ideas of big disaster movies into game form, the chaos having a deeper meaning, Keith eventually meeting characters with their own agendas, and him finding other survivors who will join him on his journey.

There’s even a point where the story can split briefly, Keith asked either to go with a young woman named Karen to find her dog or with another reporter named Greg who is trying to unravel why Stiver is going under so badly as well. The game does have multiple endings based on a few factors like your choice here, although many of them are just the sort of abrupt kind that don’t wrap up the story elements but instead exist as novelties before it throws you back in and asks you to make the other choice. Karen and Greg’s paths merge after a short while, but Greg’s is perhaps the more interesting of the two, Keith heading off to an amusement park and meeting Kelly who has a more meaningful motivation for staying on the island in trying to find her brother. Kelly’s path has the more interesting disaster setpieces as well before it becomes identical to Karen’s, favoring the flooding of unique locations over the crumbling buildings Karen’s takes you near that are more common in the game in general, but Karen does have closer personal ties to the overarching plot. The good news is that neither path is so different that it feels like you’re missing out for taking the other, so it really is a matter of personal preference.

Unfortunately, the story is held back in more than a few ways. Characters have completely still faces meaning they can’t properly show emotion at any time, and while they do have voiced lines during scenes, the game doesn’t use the voice acting to its full effect. After someone just barely survives something perilous, you’re more likely to be told by that character in a text box later that they were very shocked and worried rather than see that expressed in any way. A lot of the unvoiced dialogue can be a bit corny since a lot of it is on the nose statements delivered flatly, but while this is easy to forgive, the way disasters happen is a lot harder to swallow. The game is focused on its plot to its detriment at times, that mostly manifesting in that every disaster needs to happen in a very particular manner. Invisible triggers in the environment need to be tripped to tell the game to cause something to happen such as a road crumbling or a building falling over, and it’s hard to get immersed in the fear of the moment when it’s done a bit blatantly. Disasters can kill your character sometimes, the player needing to move out of the way of falling objects or keep moving during the more energetic action scenes, but there are a lot of cases where you’re walking along and something breaks away in an area it couldn’t have impacted you. If you do die during one of the more perilous moments and are sent back, you can quite easily see the moment you’re cuing the chaos. It’s no surprise this is the case when you consider how games are coded, but there are some cases too egregious to ignore. One involves you walking through a small space to reach a new street in the city, and right after you do so, a scene shows a chunk of a building that has no logical way of being such a shape sliding out like a Jenga block and slamming down to prevent you from going backwards, your character still standing right next to where the rubble fell as if even he knew he was in no peril.

Most of the game is based around the idea that you are in peril when the place starts shaking, but it doesn’t hide its design well enough, meaning the player will quickly become aware of how scripted everything is and stop feeling any paranoia or overwhelming danger when moving forward. Any disaster in your path is designed to be cleared and it usually doesn’t even ask too much of you, often being a constant forward run that twists a little when it’s actually deadly enough to concern you. Smaller moments of peril are perhaps better in design in that some are actually traps you can’t overcome while others require you to brace yourself when you feel the ground rumbling to avoid a deadly fate. There is a health system in Disaster Report, your life meter basically being how well you can take the effects of the game’s disasters. Earthquakes, flooding, and fire are the main three, their effects varying from moment to moment. Earthquake is the most likely to rob you of your health unless you brace yourself and wait out the tremors, but flooding and fire are a bit different. Sometimes flooding will let you swim around in it (although the game doesn’t animate it well and the noise during it is obnoxious), sometimes water is a roadblock that can’t even be touched, and other times entering it is an instant death. Fire is more consistently deadly, being an instant kill if you do more than lightly brush it.

Getting around these hazards and staying healthy is the main game component of Disaster Report, segments asking for precise movement when navigating rubble or quick action when things are falling apart, so long as that falling apart isn’t obvious set dressing. Outside of instant kills though, Disaster Report won’t really threaten you because of just how generous its scavenging is. In an open area when things aren’t shaking, you are free to look around and try to find helpful items. Some items are bits to help you better understand the island, but you’ll find plenty of things that conceivably should help you out. Bandages and similar medical supplies will heal you up, but dying gives a full heal as well so they might soon clutter your backpack as you rarely take so much damage to really need the reserves. Besides health, Disaster Report also has a thirst meter, your character needing fresh water every now and then or else their health will drain. Luckily, Stiver Island is flush with water sources that are not only the game’s save points, but also can give you a thirst quenching drink and fill any water bottles you have on hand. Water bottles can hold a bit too much water, meaning that this mechanic might as well not exist so long as you’ve got a few for the rare moment you haven’t found a water fountain lately. The game tosses other item types at you like things to light dark areas or items that purify sea water… but areas that would require either item rarely appear. You can craft items that also rarely have any importance, but you do find some equipment that can protect you from the few health draining moments to further lessen that barely present concern. The game does try to make things a bit harder by having Keith get thirstier when he’s running compared to regular walking. Considering that your walk is horrendously slow, you will want to run even when you’re not trying to avoid being crushed by debris, and the thirst penalty is offset by how much reserve water you can carry in your backpack anyway.

The interplay of all the game systems is poorly done in Disaster Report, so the strength of the setpieces is where it hopes to keep players interested. The game does continue to change things up as you go along, but the interactivity is usually limited to easily outrunning the danger, searching large quiet areas for an item you need to progress, or moments where the game tries to do platforming but has Keith move so awkwardly that it’s easy to fail simple jumps due to the odd physics of the movement. The flashy memorable moments are often ones that require the least input from the player, often just them holding forward and lightly adjusting their path to avoid small obstacles, but the more involved segments often have bad checkpointing with instant death as well, meaning repetition is heaped onto easy opportunities for failure. The game even dips into some stealth sections as you approach the end which actually require a bit of careful moving that is a bit more complicated than outrunning falling rubble, but those are the segments worst about their checkpoint placement because of how much of it is slowly waiting for guys to move into place. Really, any time you must interact with the game is either too plain to impress or held back by some issue with the way it is executed, leaving very little to enjoy outside of the moments the disasters are given the visual impact you’d hope to see.

THE VERDICT: Disaster Report sets itself up well for its concept, creating an artificial island where everything can go wrong to best feed the flashy spectacle of seeing it fall down around the characters, but it squanders it by not designing the game element to make the best use of it. The survival elements are undercooked and can be eliminated as a concern early on and easily, most of what you scavenge usually has a niche use it immediately fills next to where it’s found, and many moments where you are avoiding the effects of the earthquake shaking Stiver Island feel too artificial or are interacted with very plainly. Disaster Report has a lot of what a disaster movie would need in its spectacle and story, but the game it’s been made into lacks the suspense or danger you’d hope to feel through trying to survive an island crumbling into the sea.

And so, I give Disaster Report for the PlayStation 2…

A TERRIBLE rating. Disaster Report may not be bad enough to warrant me doing a Disaster Report on it, but it was certainly close at times. Its failures are very much tied to it not connecting the gameplay to the situation very well, but minor tweaks could have salvaged everything. Removing some of the more blatant triggers for crumbling scenery or perhaps broadening their execution could make them more interesting and feel less scripted, the big flashy scenes could have had a lot more peril rather than just running forward to escape, and pretty much everything about the survival mechanics could have been retooled so water is appropriately scarce and items had more than one or two uses before being worthless.

If you take the shell of the story and the setpieces and put a more capably designed survival experience inside it, Disaster Report could achieve some of the heart-pounding suspense and danger it’s trying to convey. While just like a disaster movie it probably wouldn’t be an outstanding example of what its medium can do, it could have at least delivered on the thrills that draw people to watch those kinds of films but through a more involved video game experience. Sadly, Disaster Report’s game side is a mess, but it’s not a big enough mess to even earn the curiosity really awful games can earn.