To rescue people -- and the occasional canine -- sitting dazed and confused in the oven, just waiting for that right man with a tie to come and drag them out.You'll do this by swimming, climbing ladders, sliding down ropes, moving boxes, and climbing ledges. Typical platforming material? Definitely. But you'll also have the opportunity to put out fires, to pick up injured civilians and carry them around a level, and a whole slew of useful things, all with the intention of finding the poor saps and helping them escape. Your interactions with civilians will serve as a pretty sizable portion of your activities in the game, as the game's lengthy tutorial will show. Fat civilians can push steel boxes, but can't really climb, requiring Mr. Esc and another civilian to pull them up. Kid civilians can crawl through very narrow spaces and walk over weak floor materials that would crumble under the weight of anyone else. And dogs...well, dogs can't do as much, but they can leap long distances. Awesome.
You'll have a lot on your plate as you navigate through the burning/drowning/crumbling environments, which makes that constantly-ticking clock on the top screen all the more threatening. Your score is proportionate to how quickly you can make it out with all of the civilians, adding an ever-present sense of urgency to your actions, a realization that isn't helped much by the clumsy controls.
Don't get me wrong: it is possible to play Exit DS with the stylus. If you're a patient person, you could even complete the game with it, though it likely won't enhance your enjoyment of the game. Even using the buttons can't negate a very simple truth: Mr. Esc, despite his chosen profession, is pretty freaking slow. Thankfully you can hold down a button to force him into a sprint, but that capability isn't as useful as it might seem, given that you'll be climbing things or pushing things around far more than you'll actually be running around a building.
Still, Mr. Esc's individual faults are forgivable, especially since you're still infinitely more talented than the unlucky idiots you'll encounter in every level. They have enough street smarts not to put themselves in a fatal situation, but they can be a little difficult to control, particularly when you're ordering them around from a different floor in the building. It's more of an annoyance than anything else, however, and something you'll adapt to within the first twenty levels of the game, provided you stick around long enough to see them all.
I daresay it's worth doing. It's a tempered recommendation, given Exit DS's quirks, but there's still a genuinely interesting game behind it all, one that's worth at least taking a gander at. Successfully navigating a level -- particularly the later ones, which are delicious masochism -- and rescuing every idiot along the way can be a pretty satisfying experience, especially when you grow well-accustomed to the game mechanics. Those mechanics expand over the course of the game, too, to introduce new actions and situations, which helps keeps things fresh as you advance through the massive amount of levels.
Consider too that almost every level in the game has a time limit hovering around the ten minute mark and you'll see that Exit DS is clearly meant for the pick-up and play lifestyle. It might take you multiple tries to beat that time limit, yes, but that's half the fun: despite the blood of platforming that runs through its veins, Exit DS is very much a puzzle game, one that'll force you to fire some neurons in an attempt to discover the quickest way to the exit. Clever, challenging levels with an emphasis on speed? This is gaming to go in all of its arcade glory, and definitely worth checking out if you can grab a copy for cheap.
