It’s another day and you find yourself once more the rookie on the team. This time you’re going out with the Special Chemical Disaster Prevention Unit. Being new to the gig you are only going to get low level job, but as your expertise expands you get access to all the cool vehicles and get to be involved in the most dangerous missions...

Chemical Spillage Simulation is another sim game from Excalibur Publishing, the label that doesn’t know the meaning of niche market; if there’s a sim you want then there’s a good chance Excalibur either has or will be releasing it.

At the beginning you’re a kind of cross between a fireman and a safety inspector, it’s all low level stuff, but it gets you used to the games controls and driving vehicles. At its best the game has you dealing with an atomic power plant. As well as vehicles, you get your very own Robot Analysis Unit, which you can send off to collect samples which would be potentially toxic to humans.

The game presents an open world scenario with many different, fairly well detailed environments in which to ply your trade. Here you can wander around in your bio hazard suit, after setting up your mobile lab, which you will use when not playing with the Special Chemical Analysis Vehicle.

Honestly, normally you would have a point of reference for a simulation, I mean I have a fair idea what a policeman does, same with pilot, fireman and train driver, so I’d have some idea how near to the real experience the game was. Who out there either had a burning ambition to be a chemical spillage expert or even really knows what that entails? If the game had told me that I rode a midget gimp to every job, I would probably have questioned its voracity, but then how would I really know?

That said, kudos to Excalibur offering up simulations you wouldn’t even think off. There is probably an educational value to most of the games as you get to try out different professions before committing the rest of your life to it.

Although it may seem like an odd choice for a sim, once you get into the game there is a lot of fun to be had saving humanity from their self-created folly.

6

Charles Packer