Don't be fooled by the box art nor the promise of wholesome, role model fun by playing an everyday hero like a fireman, policeman or paramedic. Emergency Mayhem is really just a slapped-together game looking to lure unsuspecting Wii owners with the promise of "when I grow up I want to be a fireman" whimsy and then pretty much fails to deliver it on all fronts.

Truth is, Emergency Mayhem is a shallow, clunky, often unwieldy game that has you tooling around in a police car, fire truck, or ambulance attending to an unremitting string of catastrophes in the chronically disaster prone town of "Crisis City." Though there is a "free roaming" sense to it all, sort of like Grand Theft Auto except as an emergency responder instead of a thug, the game is predisposed to making you go from A to B and then dealing with problems through little mini-game affairs of wanking and waggling the Wii-mote to, for example, crank a fire hydrant valve, smack out a fire, shoot bananas, pop balloons... you know, day's work for the city's finest.

Aside from its embarrassing graphical presentation that would have drawn scoffs a console generation previous, the controls for both driving around and engaging each mini-game range sporadically from sluggish to bang-on tight to hypersensitive.

And even if you do manage to coax the Wii-mote into doing what the little animated icon in the corner say you aren't, the interactive ditties repeat themselves all the time, though they're only amusing for roughly the 15 seconds it takes to complete one the first time.

The most fun, funnily enough, is mowing down inattentive pedestrians in your firetruck, police car or ambulance, all in the name of "comic mischief." How's that for "role model"?