Disaster: Day of Crisis

Disaster: Day of Crisis is an action-adventure from Monolith Soft that casts the player as former rescue worker Raymark Lanphar amid a chain of disasters – earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and terrorist attacks that strike a fictional island nation over the course of several days. The game unfolds in an episodic structure, with each chapter offering a different location and a different type of danger, from collapsing buildings and flooded subway tunnels to burning trains and crumbling bridges.

The gameplay alternates between action shootouts from cover, platforming passages dodging falling debris, and so-called quick-time events, where the player must press a button or shake the controller at the right moment to survive a fall or an explosion, or to save a drowning civilian. Between the action sequences there are also calmer passages of providing first aid to the wounded through simple minigames, giving the game a slight touch of rescue simulation alongside pure action. Visually, it's a fairly ambitious cinematic spectacle with dramatic music and scripted disaster sequences that in many ways recall the action disaster films of the 1990s.

Upon release, the game received mixed reviews – praised for its grand, cinematic set pieces and variety of situations, but often criticized for cumbersome control schemes relying on motion sensors and uneven difficulty across chapters. Still, Disaster: Day of Crisis remains an interesting example of how Monolith Soft, later famous for the Xenoblade Chronicles series, attempted to blend a cinematic action-adventure with the disaster genre, and for fans of B-movie action films it offers solid, appealing, and not-to-be-underestimated entertainment on Wii, even though the title never achieved the same acclaim as the studio's later work focused on science fiction and fantasy JRPGs.