What EMERGENCY 20 is
EMERGENCY 20 is a real-time rescue strategy game where you act as incident commander. You give orders to units from four branches: fire department, medical services, police and technical units. The situations come fast and varied — an illegal street race, a fireworks factory fire, a meteorite impact in an inner city, a nuclear meltdown. You decide in real time where to deploy your units and which tasks get handled first, and you work with a limited roster, so placement and priority matter. Plans fall apart quickly when something unexpected hits, which is the core of the tension.
This is the anniversary edition: 10 classic missions from 20 years of EMERGENCY rebuilt with modern graphics and gameplay, plus the full content of EMERGENCY 5, EMERGENCY 2016 and EMERGENCY 2017 — their campaigns, multiplayer maps and freeplay modes. Three difficulty settings let you tune the challenge to how you like to play. There are also videos covering the original missions with commentary from EMERGENCY creator Ralph Stock and community member Godra, which give some background on how the series was designed.
Playing together
The game supports online co-op and online PvP, so your group can either team up to run a rescue together or face off. Alongside multiplayer there is Free Play and the campaigns, giving you different ways to spend a session as a group. Because orders happen in real time, coordinating who handles what — medical, fire, police, technical — is the main thing to sort out between players before the situation escalates.
Before you start
The package is aimed at both newcomers and long-time players, and it's a reasonable entry point if you've never touched the series: three campaigns, the 10 re-imagined missions, Free Play and multiplayer. Expect a tactical, management-heavy pace rather than a shooter — you're positioning units and juggling priorities under time pressure.
Worth noting for Mac players: the Mac version includes campaign, freeplay and multiplayer, but it does not support mods. The Windows version does, and "Moddable" is one of the game's tags, so mod support is a Windows-side feature only.