Ambulance Driver (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 0.5 stars Abysmal
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 1.4 (0.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Andrew Park
• Reviewed on: 05/13/2002
• Updated on: 05/14/2002
• Released on: 03/31/2002
• Originally published on GameSpot: Ambulance Driver (PC) Review

To put it bluntly, ValuSoft's Crisis Team: Ambulance Driver is the worst game so far this year, and it's one of the worst games we've seen in a long, long time. If you were checking this review just to find out whether you should buy this game, the answer is no. Move on to a better game. If you're actually wondering what makes it so terrible, read on.

Ambulance Driver is a budget-priced driving game that shamelessly steals its basic ideas from Sega's 1999 arcade game, Crazy Taxi, which was later ported to the Dreamcast in 2000. Crazy Taxi was a simple, fun racing game in which you played as a cab driver who drove through the streets of a large, colorful city, picked up passengers, and had to drive them to their destinations within a certain period of time. You could also earn bonus cash and points by delivering your passenger quickly or performing some crazy stunts, like narrowly scraping past oncoming cars. Ambulance Driver is an arcade-style driving game in which you drive an ambulance and have to pick up injured people on the street and then ferry them back to the hospital within a certain amount of time--or else they'll die. Ambulance Driver is a lot like Crazy Taxi but without the crazy, the taxi, the stunts, the speed, or any of the fun.

For starters, Ambulance Driver looks awful. Even though the game has three different city courses, they all look terrible. The game's buildings, walls, and other scenery have such ugly, low-quality textures that they look as though they were drawn freehand in a matter of minutes with the trial version of an outdated graphics program. Instead of driving through a large, colorful city as in Crazy Taxi, in Ambulance Driver, you'll sometimes feel like you're driving through a maze of crayon-marked cardboard walls. Ambulance Driver also has a ridiculous amount of graphical pop-up. That is, as you drive down the road, objects such as scenery, oncoming cars, and pedestrians all appear out of thin air, and they do it constantly. The game's pedestrians themselves look like crudely drawn, crudely animated, blocky stick figures that will try to dodge your ambulance if you get too close to them. What's worse, instead of dodging, they'll often "fall" out of the way--basically, rather than bending their knees, or actually running, they'll just lean forward stiffly and fly a few feet.

Ambulance Driver sounds terrible too. The game's soundtrack consists of upbeat but repetitive rock-and-roll music that isn't offensive, or wouldn't be, if it weren't being used in a blatant attempt to copy Crazy Taxi's similar, better soundtrack. The actual game's sound effects are generally lousy and often mistimed-- like when your ambulance crashes into a building or signpost and then makes a crashing noise a moment later. The game's voice work is also pretty bad. If you get too close to pedestrians, they'll berate you just before diving out of the way (just like in Crazy Taxi). Except that rather than use any kind of positional sound, the game makes all pedestrians sound like they're magically sitting next to you and talking into your ear, rather than making a superhuman leap five feet away from your ambulance. And instead of employing a decent voice actor as an announcer, as Crazy Taxi did with its Wolfman Jack sound-alike, Ambulance Driver has a nerdy Canadian guy who sounds like one of the programmers.

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