Released in 2017, is the product of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Originally released on PC, 911 Operator eventually made its way to consoles including the version I checked out on the Nintendo Switch. Have you ever wondered what kind of stress a 911 Operator goes through? Well, that is what this game is trying to show you.
How to Download 911 Operator
The game can be downloaded from Steam. To begin your adventure, click on the Download button. You will find it located below this review. You can also download several 911 Operator DLCs: Special Resources, Every Life Matters, First Response, and Search and Rescue.
The Game Review
You play as the person at the end of the phone taking the phone calls from people who are in trouble. At your disposal are the police, fire department and paramedics and you need to dispatch these to the appropriate emergency.
It is a really cool and unique idea and one that at first is quite addictive. You take the call, listen carefully to what they say and then decide what emergency service you need to send there. However, before this, you have to actually set up these emergency services. You do this by hiring staff and getting the right vehicles. You have a budget so you have to think about what kind of vehicles you are getting.
The people that you hire can be micromanaged in a way. You see they have two slots and you can then give them items. So a police officer, for example, you would make sure had a gun and a fireman you would make sure had a fire extinguisher. Each character has a skill rating. For example, a medic will have the skills of driving and first aid and a police officer will have driving and marksmanship.
Once you have all your services set up you are ready to take calls. The calls are quite exciting when you start playing the game. These range from a real emergency like a fire or a car accident to teenagers just wasting your time. It is up to you how you respond to these calls (which are voice acted) and what units you will send to deal with it.
You do have to listen carefully as one time I was being called about pizza! I blew it off as a prank call, but it was someone in trouble trying to low key tell me what was wrong. There are two game modes, free play which is kind of cool as you can pick any city in the world and the game will download the map and use the real cities.
There is also a career mode which takes place over a handful of American cities. This mode is quite short, but it does have special events like an earthquake and a bomb threat for you to deal with. By getting a better ranking in each city, you will move onto the next one. I feel that a bit more narrative would have made this mode better.
The last thing to really talk about is the presentation. It is very basic and you are pretty much just looking at a 2D map screen or a loadout screen where you can manage your units. While basic it does actually work and in all honesty, I cannot think of what else they could have done in terms of the presentation.
911 Operator is certainly a very interesting idea for a game. I had quite a bit of fun with this, but I did find that some of the calls did start to repeat after a while. If you like management style games, I feel that you will have a lot of fun with this. It does make me think that if they made a sequel that built on what was already here it would be pretty awesome.
