Before receiving the review copy of Raw Danger I wasn't exactly sure what kind of game I would be getting. I'd heard it described as a survival horror game with natural disasters rather than zombies. I hadn't played its predecessor Disaster Report either, so I really didn't know what to expect. I'd also read about the unintentional hilarity of Raw Danger's localization in order to get the game to conform to the Teen rating requirements by the ESRB. It really didn't seem like something that would be good for anything more than an afternoon of laughter. I was horribly wrong on most levels as Raw Danger delivers a great time at a discount price that isn't to be passed up.

Sure the game has its share of problems, but with a little imagination, and by being a bit forgiving, this is one of the best experiences with a game I've had all year. Raw Danger takes place in Geo City, "the safest city ever," in the year 2010 around Christmas time. The story of Geo City, and the disastrous flood that devastates it, is told through six playable characters. The story interweaves marvelously with moments where previously played characters are seen in the background.

The story starts out with very humble beginnings as the first character’s portion plays out like a Bus Boy 2000 simulator. Your staff helps at a major party for Geo City where the Mayor is giving a speech. You're responsible for mundane tasks like delivering water and food, and this is about as slow as the game ever gets. Even at these slow points the ingenious story telling techniques shine through by catching your attention with events that happen at the corners of the screen. If you follow these events - such as an important looking official running towards water leaking from the ceiling - the game foreshadows the events to follow.

With a burst of rushing water from doorways and walls the game turns into a sort of Universal Studios ride. The action ramping up quickly, it doesn't take long before you find yourself guiding your characters through all kinds of insane disaster scenarios. Crawling across downed pillars bridging 100-foot drops, escaping from buildings drifting into a pit because of a landslide, or rafting in a makeshift boat through lakes that used to be towns are just some of these scenarios. The game handles them all well making the action cinematically exciting and hardly ever needing to resort to a cut-scene to garnish the desired effect.

The thrills of such events come at a small price though: technical inefficiency. Raw Danger uses the same game engine from its predecessor, and it's showing its age after 5 years. The textures are bland and the details are muddy, but the world within the game is developed well enough that these can be forgiven. The controls of the game are also a bit of a problem and somewhat frustrating to get used to. For example, simple things like warming up require you to stand next to a space heater, then go to a menu, then select "warm up" to recover from the raw effects of the weather. As for the rest of the problems, I blame the Agetec localization team. The voice acting in the game is hilarious at times, and unintentionally so. Lines such as "Please save my daughter from that building which is about to drift away." are delivered without any emotional connection to them, leaving a lot of the inspiration for accomplishing such things entirely up to the player. Other items were removed or toned down to ensure a "T" rating. Items like character deaths and sexual perversion (the original ESRB report read: ”Raw Danger AGETEC M Blood, Mild Language, Sexual Themes, Violence”) were mostly removed for these reasons, leaving sections of the story jarring to the player.