‘112 Operator’ Review
I originally started playing this game in June 2023 and for whatever reason I stopped playing and moved onto other games. Well finally after one and a half years, I finished a full campaign and here are my thoughts on the game. Put on those blue lights and get ready to be dispatched into my review on 112 Operator and as always, spoilers ahead.
I only found out after playing this game that this is the sequel to 911 Operator, in which the game mainly focuses on American cities, whereas this focuses more on European and other major cities such as Berlin or London. It can even allow you to play in the closest major city to where you are, which for me was Newcastle Upon Tyne; this popped while I was midway through a campaign, but I didn’t know if this would reset my progress, so I didn’t bother switching. When I originally played this game in 2023, I started the campaign in London, but for my latest one, I decided to go with Berlin, just because it was the first choice in the list.
Starting the campaign, you are given some districts of Berlin to look after with basic units for all sectors which include the police, healthcare and firefighting service. You oversee the sending of correct services to an incident, whether it be someone phoning to report a fire somewhere, or an incident showing up on the map that there is a nudist roaming the streets. As you progress through the game, you end managing all the incidents that occur in Berlin with the ability to hire new operators to reduce the amount of phone calls you personally receive. You also unlock a wide variety of specialist units for the services, including search and rescue, crowd control and even bicycles for the police. You can also get more specialised service members, such as police with gun proficiency, doctors or my person favourite, a police dog.
I started out really enjoying the campaign and it is a very simple management game to play however, the more I played it, the more things started to bug me. I found the controls weren’t always responsive, so when I clicked on an incident, the unit wouldn’t always go and since there is a lot going on, I wouldn’t realise till a few minutes later that no one was responding to the incident.
As more units and operators get added to the game, there feels like there is constant voice lines, with operators asking for more units, as I’ve had to drag units away from their district for a search and rescue, or police asking for firefighters, when I’ve already dispatched firefighters their way, or my personal pet peeve, asking a unit to help with something and they constantly just say “negative”. I feel like the game should recognise that if there is a major incident that their will be less units in a district or during an incident, if I have assigned a service to come help, that they should know they are on their way, rather than constantly asking for one to be sent. Apart from that, there is background music that isn’t offensive, which you don’t really notice.
I also found myself getting bored near the end. My favourite part of the game was getting phone calls and having the different dialogue options, which you had to choose the correct response in a limited amount of time, which I found there was less of nearer the end of the game. There are a few scenarios that occur throughout the campaign, with the gas explosion of a building you can’t avoid, which leads to the near death of your daughter, but apart from that, the game just ends up being one phone call, where a major incidents occurs, sending the relevant units and then finishing the rest of the days sending the units to the correct incident, with little else going on.
This leads me to my next problem. At the end of the game, you oversee all incidents taken place in Berlin, which is why the game encourages you to hire other operators to lower how many incidents you must control. After hiring an operator in every district, it felt like I still had the exact same workload I had previously, with the extra major incidents occurring. It honestly feels like there is no point hiring them, as all I personally found is they just kept whinging that they had no units.
I started out really liking this game and I wish it could have been better. I would have loved to experience more phone calls at the end of the game while dealing with the major incidents going on, but as it is, I won’t be returning to the game, even for the DLC and I don’t know if I will be trying 911 Operator, since this game apparently improved on problems which occurred in that game, so I don’t know if it is really worth putting myself through a worse version of this game.
