Of all the full motion games, as disastrous as they were, at least
this one could have been enjoyable. Considering how few firefighting movies there are out
there (and even a smaller number are actually worthwhile), this could of made a nice niche
for itself too. It just falls into the rut that all FMV games do. There's simply not much to do here. You never feel like you're running into a burning building, which is a combination of intolerable video compression (at least better than the Sega CD version) and lack of control. You press a direction (pre-determined depending on the section of the house), the camera swings around, and hopefully you're lucky enough to make progress. It's disorienting enough when the brief branching clip shows up that even using the necessary maps in the instruction book is useless.
The first two levels seem to be simple training for the final stage, an incredibly overlong trek into a university that never seems to end (especially on hard). If you don't have the maps and you're not tracking where you are, it's all based on blind luck. Besides moving in a direction, all that's left is to answer questions posed to you by the rest of the team.
In-between the stages, you're briefed on what you need to do once
inside the burning building. That's necessary and important, but the audio is so
compressed it's impossible to understand what anyone is saying. It's somewhat better when
you're actually "playing." The title credit song is also deserving of a special
place in video game history, and that has nothing to do with it being classic. If there is, by some small chance, someone out there who finds themselves enjoying FMV games (likely a masochist), this does qualify a manageable one. The replay value, with multiple difficulties that actually do change the game, make it somewhat more tolerable. That's only assuming you can stomach something like this for longer than 10-minutes.
