Emergency HQ

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS AND WAIT MECHANICS

Emergency HQ is a free-to-play Management Simulation released on mobile devices in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. In this game, players direct emergency responders in their actions during emergency situations.

The presentation here is decent, with some nicely detailed 3D visuals for the locations, vehicles, and various characters running around. Unfortunately, this is undone somewhat by some shoddy animation, with somewhat realistic characters popping out of vehicles instantly and running somewhat robotically to the place they’re summoned. These visuals are backed by a soundtrack that sounds like every suspenseful action movie soundtrack ever, and complemented by voice clips where characters let you know when a vehicle is ready, among other things. It’s all fairly polished, but this comes at a price – the game has pretty significant load times throughout, especially considering the short nature of some of these missions.

The gameplay here is fairly straightforward. In each mission, players must assess the emergency, summon the appropriate emergency response vehicles, and direct these individuals which elements to respond to and when. For example, players will want to hold off on summoning paramedics to help people near a burning building until the fire is put out.

It is mostly the “order of operations” stuff that players will be dealing with here, as they’re not given too many options when responding to emergencies. When you select a character, for example, you do not direct them freely, but must simply choose which task they are to work on, and you will automatically have the applicable targets for that task highlighted.

Back at the headquarters, players will be able to improve their headquarters and add on extra buildings, but these mainly affect which missions you can go on, while also providing minimal resources over time for the game’s currencies.

Ah yes, that brings me to the microtransactions. With this being a free-to-play game, I suppose microtransactions were inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to see how far this game takes them. Not only are players offered the opportunity to buy in-game helicopter “tickets” that instantly evacuate an injured person or put out a fire, but headquarter upgrades come with real-time wait mechanics that players can spend money to bypass via one of the multiple purchasable in-game currencies. Incidentally, the use of these currencies is one of the first things this game teaches you about.

This isn’t the only issue this game has, either. Where do I begin? Well, the first thing many players are bound to notice is that this game is completely unplayable in docked mode, as it requires the touchscreen to play. Given how few options there are at any given time, this just strikes me as lazy game design. What’s more, I had the game crash a few times on me, and once or twice the game refused to register my press of touchscreen buttons until I exited the game and restarted it.

I can see the framework of a good game hiding within Emergency HQ. If players were given more options to respond to emergencies, or more direct control over characters, this could have been something special. But even then, the game would still need bug fixes, optimization to reduce the horrible load times, and a little effort to get the game working in docked mode. However, the more “what if”s I pile on to this hypothetical better version of a game that’s clearly designed to hawk microtransactions, the more it becomes clear that despite its good qualities, Emergency HQ is simply a bad a game, and its designers didn’t put in the effort to fix its major problems. Even for the price of “free”, this game isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – Emergency HQ is a free-to-play Management Simulation that has you directing the efforts of emergency professionals during various emergencies. The presentation here is good, but otherwise this game is a mess, with minimal gameplay, no ability to play in docked mode, bugs, and heavily-pushed microtransactions. Skip this one.

Grade: D

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Microtransactions

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