If you’re craving the thrill of solving real-life cases without the actual risks, 112 Operator is your game. Developed by Jutsu Games and published by Ultimate Games S.A., this simulation game offers a realistic experience of managing emergency services. Sit back, enjoy, and immerse yourself in the action.

In 112 Operator, you are tasked with managing emergency services in many different situations. Not to mention being able to face situations in any country, with weather, crime, traffic, and even the changing seasons pushing every emergency service to its limits.

You begin the game by being given the option to pick what city or country you want to start in and at what difficulty you want to play, where easy is for first-time players or people who want a pleasant, relaxing experience. But when the difficulty rises, it becomes much more challenging to manage, pushing your emergency services to the limit.

As you progress through the campaign and level up your district, it will become more complex as more districts mean more surface to cover with limited emergency services. However, the system works quite well at the end of the shift, giving insight into your response work and where you could have improved.

Not to mention getting a nice paycheck towards new and improved emergency services with more equipment and firepower to help with various incidents. Once you get the hang of how it all works, it gets much easier to coordinate and leave emergency services in ideal spots to be most effective. I have a gripe with a couple of things, one being that moving from one emergency vehicle to another sometimes made the cursor glitch around, making it almost impossible to target the right area. The other was when emergency services couldn’t get to the requested location and yelled at me, saying they couldn’t go there until I finally moved them elsewhere.

Other than that, the game felt quite fluid while also being super tricky, pushing your brain power to the edge. I found it quite nifty when a bunch of emergencies would arise simultaneously, splitting more than half of your resources, making it critical to move the proper units to the suitable emergencies—even weather affecting motorcycles and ground-based services.

The controls felt quite bizarre at first, with the D-pad using all sides to bring up different information on current emergencies, information on all your vehicles, and what personnel are inside each vehicle. You would be surprised how helpful it is as there soon become a lot of vehicles with different attributes. 112 Operator also features a fast forward and pause button to help strategise with pressing start, pausing the game, and giving you an extensive overview of the emergency services while also being able to set targets for current alerts, giving you reasonable time to think things through, one thing I thought was odd was having Y to switch from targeted movement to a mouse courser which was only valid for answering the 112 emergency line and adjusting and adding emergency services.

Although the graphics may not be impressive, they are still detailed enough. They show a top-down view of a map with symbols for the emergency services’ home base. They also provide icons for moving vehicles and following roads to different zones. Some large wildfires spread through the region if not controlled, showing depth.

Now, the sound was tricky as it felt very nostalgic to hear radio communications of a man, and I quote, “being stabbed by a stingray.” but after a while, it starts to overpower and drown out the rest of the game, not to mention hearing the same radio calls got boring. Even when sending units out, listening to the sirens felt very natural, and the sound of the weather affected the game and units in play. When I first heard the lightning, it made me jump a little. The voice acting of the 112 calls was quite good. Hearing the fear and anger in their voices felt so genuine.

Overall, 112 Operator has some great ideas that have been executed quite well, but it doesn’t feel complete. Although the game is quite fun to play, unlocking new vehicles and emergencies kept it alive, it felt like it was trying too hard. Don’t get me wrong, the amount of work that went into creating a top-down strategy game like this isn’t easy and for what it’s worth, it’s a very tricky game to get your head around, especially if you’re testing yourself on higher difficulties. I can see a good player base for 112 Operator for its strategy aspect, but I feel it didn’t meet expectations.

Written by: TypicalCambieAU