Emergency Driver Simulator

Genre: Driving / Racing Game

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the City’s Hero Collection bundle, along with Construction Site Driver.)

Emergency Driver Simulator, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a game that has players driving various vehicles in a Simulation-style game that tasks you with using vehicles to do various tasks, often taking the form of getting through a series of checkpoints and then parking in a designated spot as fast as you can without colliding with too many obstacles (or sometimes simply getting to a finish line).

(Note: This game shares a lot in common with the trio of games that were in Speedster’s Collection. As such, I have copied my review for those games here, changing it based on what is different this time)

The presentation here is decent but unspectacular, with sufficient 3D visuals that get the job done, but are not noteworthy in any way. Despite this, there’s plenty of nasty pop-in and repeated slowdown too, and just overall this game is not very visually-appealing. The game doesn’t even have sounds for the sirens, and the flashing lights on vehicles that have them are extremely unimpressive.

As for the gameplay, Emergency Driver Simulator is an odd halfway point between a Driving Simulation and a Racing game. There aren’t any other racers here – your only real enemy is the ticking clock and a damage meter that depletes with each collision. There are other cars on the roads in this game, but they act as obstacles rather than opponents, or on some of the police car’s stages, as targets to take out.

The game’s missions all take place in the same city at night, and unlike most of the games using this template, there is a little variation in what you’ll be doing. While some stages will simply having you race through translucent blue gates to get to a spot you need to park in, or multiple spots you need to stop at, the aforementioned police chase stages having you trying to collide with a speeding car, and street cleaner stages have you trying to drive over stains on the ground seeking to clean them up as quickly as possible. It’s still a bit repetitive, but it’s more varied than the overwhelming majority of other games drawing from this gameplay foundation.

However, while the additional variety is nice, this game’s controls are just terrible. Your vehicles’ turning radius is restrictive, the brakes take far too long to kick in, and just overall everything here is far too stiff and clunky to be enjoyable. Furthermore, this game makes the odd choice to make players manually switch to reverse instead of just making it tied to brake. This can make three-point turns particularly annoying.

Finally, this game’s $14 standard price is a joke, because this doesn’t even feel like a full game. It’s far too repetitive and simple, there’s no multiplayer, and I just cannot see most players enjoying this game for more than a few minutes before putting it down forever. Of course, we all know that $14 price tag is just a placeholder to make the game seem like a really good deal when it frequently goes on sale, but the bottom-of-the-barrel $2 price tag really seems like it should have been this game’s normal price, especially since this developer is re-using assets across multiple games.

In the end, while Emergency Driver Simulator had some potential, it just has far too many problems to be worthwhile. The controls are bad, the graphics aren’t super impressive, and the price tag is far too high for what’s on offer. This is one of the better games to use this formula, but it’s still just not very good.

tl;dr – Emergency Driver Simulator is a game that mixes elements of Driving Simulation and Racing games, with a focus mainly on the Driving Simulation side of things. Unfortunately, the vehicles here do not handle well, it is far too lacking in options and content for its price, and while it has more variety than most other games from this developer, it’s still overall severely lacking. I do not recommend this.

Grade: C

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