I have a minor but unwholesome obsession with fire that extends from Far Cry 2’s self-propagating blazes through the pyropoetics of Andrea Brady to, most recently, Rescue Ops: Wildfire. In the latter, single and multiplayer firefighting sim, you must save people and battle dynamic blazes on large, countryside maps. Inspired by the increase in wildfires thanks to climate change, it was developed with input from real-life French firefighters, and seems both frantic and strategic. Here’s a trailer.
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My immediate armchair arsonist question is: exactly how credible and changeable are these conflagrations? The Steam page suggests that they respond to wind direction and strength. Beyond that, we can deduce things from the tools and tactics you’ll use against them. A good rule of thumb is to deprive them of fuel, whether by hacking trees down or starting controlled but inevitably riskier “tactical backfires” to burn off the vegetation in the wildfire’s path.
The Steam page also distinguishes between defensive firefighting, which is about containment, and offensive firefighting, which is about sending people in to extinguish the blaze. Naturally, you will have to worry about water supply and also, managing the hoses from your truck. Other vehicles include water bombers and helicopters for shuttling people around. The vehicle handling puts me slightly in mind of Spintires and co. Check out the bit in the trailer where the driver eases oh-so-carefully over a bump in the road.
There’s a campaign offering that is broken into missions, and a sandbox mode with random objectives, where you’ll put everything you’ve learned to the test. Both can be played solo or in 2-4 player co-op multiplayer. Perhaps they could add a morbid asymmetrical mode that casts one player as a firestarter, with character classes ranging from “adorable Girl Scout with very large magnifying glass” to “Mad Max flamethrower guitarist”.
It’s all the work of Marseille-based Exkee, who’ve been knocking around since 2003 and have worked on, amongst other things, mobile spin-offs for Tomb Raider, Ghost Recon and Age Of Empire.
With regard to the climate change inspiration, the bare irony of fire simulations is that the more the in-game fire spreads, the more computing resource it generally needs, and so, the more electricity it requires to run. Still, I don’t get the sense that playing Rescue Ops will be like founding a crypto-mining business. If you share my weird love of the flame, may I direct you towards Tenderfoot Tactics, an RPG in which battle maps can be wantonly reconfigured using elemental spells.
