By sjj_admin 
Originally published on GameOnAus.com in Feb 2022
Rescue Party: Live! is a co-operative party game from developer TAG Studio and published by 505 Games. Between one and four players work to rescue people from disasters such as fire and flood and heal what ails them.
The game starts simply. There are injured people that need healing and to be evacuate to an ambulance. Some items can be given directly to them, but others need to be crafted at a crafting table before they can be applied. As the game progresses addition features are included, such as having to put the right combination of different coloured medicines in a centrifuge to create what the person needs. There are also straight up rescue levels, where you need to solve puzzles quickly and escape hazards such as rising water.
It felt like the game threw these concepts out without much explanation. There are little windows that pop up in game as a guide but levels are timed and it always felt that it takes half of that time to understand what’s going on. A small video the first time these features are introduced would go a long way to helping work out what players need to do.
When a level is finished you get a ranking between zero and three stars depending on how well you did. At least one star is needed to progress to the next level. In game currency is earnt from levels that can be used to purchase new skins and costumes.
Most of my time with Rescue Party: Live! was spent in four player co-op, which I think is the best way to play it. There is a single player option that I tried for a couple of levels. There are two avatars that you can swap between to make things go quicker, but it gets incredible hard to keep track of what to do.
Rescue Party: Live! is a pretty fun game that suffers from lack of explanation about its mechanics. Sure it doesn’t take long to figure it out but the first question when jumping into a level shouldn’t be “what do I do now?” or trying to apply lessons learnt from previous levels only to find that’s not good enough anymore. It’s definitely not a game that should be played solo.
Rescue Party: Live! is out now on PC.