While the title of the game, 911 Operator isn’t necessarily the most creative, it is very precise. The game is all about putting you in the shoes of a 911 operator, answering emergency calls and dispatching emergency services around the city that you are responsible for, in order to handle the many problems that arise during a given day in that city. Calls that come in vary in severity from cats caught in trees, to loud parties, to traffic accidents, all the way to the frantic, distraught cries of panic of a father who finds his daughter after a drug overdose. You are responsible for sending the right service between police, fire and ambulances (or any combination of these) in order to handle the various situations quickly and safely, so that those units can get back into service and assist in the next thing.
It’s a constant balancing act of having more things happening at once than you have available units to send. One of the things you learn early on is that there are plenty of red herring style calls that come in that aren’t quite emergencies, or they are things that may seem like emergencies, but aren’t quite as time-sensitive as others. At the same time, however, there are plenty of other situations that seem benign when they are called in, like a loud party call, that turns violent with shots fired and injured people needing to be taken to the hospital.
There is a lot of information coming in at once and fortunately, the user interface of the game is designed cleanly and with enough clarity to make the interaction with it quite intuitive and responsive, for the most part. There are times, however, where there are several things happening close together and the automatic snap-to function of the interface can cause you to accidentally select things that you weren’t intending on doing. Also, the way that incoming calls are shown on the city map with similar icons, makes it easy to sometimes get confused which call is which. I once sent a firetruck to a robbery call on accident because I was trying to send them to a fully-involved fire that was across town and the two green icons were identical.
The city maps themselves might be my favorite part of the game. They are actual maps of real cities. After you complete the tutorial, which takes place in the Hawaiian city of Kapolei, you then proceed to start your full career mode in Albuquerque. The career mode has a set of several different cities that you progress through, but there is a Free mode in the game that allows you to play in any of literally hundreds of different real-world cities. While the gameplay is similar no matter which city you play in, having the variation of the map adds a level of novelty to the experience.
Another feature that I was particularly impressed with in the game was the voice-acted 911 calls. The emotion that comes across the phone calls is really well-done. There are a few that really make you realize just how stressful a job being a 911 operator can be. The feeling of hopelessness when there’s someone begging you for help on the phone and you are doing everything you can to try and get someone to them to help them, but it’s just not fast enough…there’s something really heartbreaking about that. And then you have to just carry on and treat the next call with the same level of professionalism and attention that you do all the rest, even if it’s just a cat in a tree. The swings in emotion are sometimes the hardest to handle. You get worked up and agitated because of a series of really bad calls and then you have to be able to scale it all back and realize that something isn’t an emergency and to back off a bit.
The game does a very good job of giving you the tools to manage the emergency services and try to make the most of what you have. One thing that I didn’t particularly like about it was that it puts the micro-management of purchasing and equipping vehicles, weapons, tools, and personnel to the services that you are dispatching for. I felt like this stepped outside the bounds of what a 911 operator is actually responsible for and it wasn’t what I particularly wanted to have to worry about on top of all the other stuff that is involved in the game. I’m sure that that aspect is enjoyable for some, but for me, I felt like it was an unrealistic addition to a game that is attempting to simulate putting you in the shoes of a dispatcher.
All in all, however, the game is very fun and it was definitely more than I expected it to be when I first saw it in the store.
