As a 911 operator, I got a couple chuckles out of this game, but there are a few nitpicky things I'm not wild about either. This review is to address those issues.

Overall, I like the game and recommend it for the money. It's fun and I'll keep playing it despite doing this for a living.

***THIS REVIEW HAS MILD SPOILERS AND IS MEANT FOR FELLOW DISPATCHERS OR ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS IS AN ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF WHAT DISPATCH IS LIKE***

1. Other Operators back me up here, but in my city if you request the police, you get the police. Even if the crime happened an hour ago, a week ago, whatever. You ask for them, they come. They might not be happy about it, but they come. This game penalizes you for sending officers on frivolous calls. Believe me, I'd like nothing better than to ticket people who waste 911's time, but that just isn't how it works in most major dispatch centers.

2. OBS callers. Where all my crazy people at?! Also my 911 hangups? Butt Dials from disconnected government cell phones (Thanks Obama!). Babies playing with phones. This stuff takes up at least half my night.
I liked that one of the first domestic calls in the game was a pizza call, that was a nice touch, but it's not terribly common. Dealing with barely cooperative cell phone companies to try and ping suicidal or injured people's location (looking at you T-Mobile)? All the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time.

3. I am not the Chief. I don't decide what specialized equipment (or in reality training, equipment is pretty standardized) each unit has. I can see what attributes each unit has, and dispatch them accordingly, but telling an officer he can't have his gun because he has a dog and body armor already? Not my job. I make due with what I'm given. There should be a mode where you don't get to decide anything, unit are manned based on the estimated budget of a city.

4. I am not the County Executive. I don't hire police, EMS or Firefighters. I don't pay their salary (you know, directly) and I don't give half a damn about the financial side of it. Above my pay grade. Long as my check keeps coming, I'm good.

5. Where's my ♥♥♥♥♥♥, outdated software?! My LEO servers with lag like a mofo. My Quad or (what's the word for 5? Cinc?) 5 screen setup, three keyboards, 3 computer mice and a footpedal? I multitask like you wouldn't believe if you've never done it. I'd love it if this interface was adequate to dispatching units. I'd suggest switching over tomorrow. I'd throw a party when our CAD was uninstalled. On that same topic, where my every state has different ways of entering wanted subjects at? Pain in the ass running out of state plates.

6. Chatty Point to Point and units. Gotta love it when the adjacent agency keys up on the radio and tells you all about their stolen vehicle that's nowhere near you, has an impossible plate # and was stolen 4 hours ago. Or when your officers play musical chairs with the calls you assigned them because they're out of their assigned beat (to be fair, sometimes that's your fault for sending them there). Or EMS guy who thinks he's Shakespeare on the EMS radios? These things all tie up dispatching units until the air is clear to do so.

7. The Fatigue. Play this game for 12 hours straight with no breaks unless someone relieves you to pee. Also, either quickly swallow your snack or spit it out when someone calls 911 or you have to dispatch a unit.

8. Uncooperative callers. I've only played to Albequerque so far (Loved the Breaking Bad call), so maybe I haven't seen it yet. Sometimes, people are playing games with you. They don't actually want help, they want someone to leave and are using 911 as a threat and as such they won't tell you the address they're at. Sometimes that doesn't end well for them as the other party will take the phone away before I can get a rebid on the ANI/ALI screen.

9. The Typing. Address, call comments, callback numbers. That stuff doesn't just appear by magic or mouse click. I type it all in and time is a factor. Should be a mode for that. Added to that, sometimes you don't understand people the first time they give you an address. You have to ask again. And again. Until they take the marbles out of their mouth and answer you.

10. Officer callouts. Sometimes you have no idea there's been a crime, you're in an office. One of your cars keys up and says "6 Lincoln 81, Traffic!" You say "6 Lincoln 81?" They say "traffic at the intersection of xxxx ave and yyyy street with a gold cutlass, plate for issue David Union Mary Boston Charles Adam Robert." Means that unit is busy now writing a ticket. Can't send them anywhere.

11. Duplicate calls. We live in an age of cell phones. In this game, if there's an accident the driver or a passerby calls you and tells you about it. In reality, the driver, the other driver, all 4 passengers of both vehicles, every passerby (that's good, if you see an accident call us about it!) the driver's kid sister she was texting with and her boyfriend in another state calls about it. You have to handle those calls professionaly but quickly to free up your phone lines for other emergencies. Same with shootings, fights, Domestics. There is often more than one caller because everyone has a phone. I feel like figuring out which calls are duplicates and which aren't should be reflected in this.

12. The emotional toll. So far I've had a few domestic calls and an overdose in the game that tried to be sad without depressing you. That's good, it's just a game after all. But I've talked to gunshot victim children, husbands and parents of suicidal people and even just grown kids finding their deceased of old age parents. There's nothing quite so depressing as a child calling about his Dad beating up his Mom. I understand that this game would be horribly unpopular and sell exactly 0 copies if it were an exact replication of dispatching work. But none of the calls had much of an emotional punch to me. Maybe I'm jaded or maybe I'm just not far enough in yet, but some calls phase you. Judging from what I've heard this far, I don't expect it here.

13. Municipalities. I realize this isn't an issue for everyone, but sometimes you can't send an available and nearby officer to a call near his location because he's in a different municipality in real life. You may dispatch for both areas, but one officer may not have the authority to write reports in a municipality he doesn't work in. This game doesn't draw that distinction. It could, you'd just have to color code the police cars and color code areas of the maps to correspond with them. You could send any car to assist another if they come under fire or need backup and their CO approves. But in a green area, a green police car would have to be present to finish the call, no matter how many blue cars are there.

*** TIPS FOR NON DISPATCHERS***
The correct first response on any given call is "WHERE?". It will always be where, it has always been where. If you run up against a choice where "where" is not a given first option, the game is wrong.

At no point should you direct someone to risk their own lives or leave a place of safety.

Always send more than one police car to a Domestic. They are bad news. Alway have been. Really, this applies to any gathering with substantially more suspects than police. But especially Domestics.

Stagger your units. Police, Fire and EMS have beats, districts and sectors for a reason. It's to maximize the area you can cover and minimize response time. I know the game likes to group them up at the start of a map, that's a trap. Don't fall for it. When the call is over, send them back to the areas you had them in. In reality, our computers remember our beats for us, though it's not a bad idea to know it yourself (for when your overworked, ancient dispatch computer decides it has had quite enough of this "functioning" thing you speak of). This game isn't that kind to you, so just make up your own, but keep them spread out and near major intersections.

TLDR: Definitely worth your time, especially on the launch sale!

I've been waiting for this one!
I'm an actual 911 operator/dispatcher with almost a decade on the job.

Do I want to leave work, come home, and ...do this more? Actually...yes. :D

Obviously they had to boil down years of training and experience into a digestible format and I think they have succeeded for the most part. The UI is fairly polished (with a few hiccups I would address with the developers since this is version 1.0.0). The immersion is great, the price is right, and the action is intense. The main differences is this game has a narrative that is straight out of hollywood unreal, with officer-involved shootings and weapon altercations far more frequent than reality. Reality is boring and 95% routine reports, stubbed toes, and tree-cats. This game is 95% robberies and heart attacks and building fires.

This game legitimately makes the hair on my neck stand on end when I've tasked my 4 officers to 4 calls;

1. A hangup call, probably kids, maybe a home invasion.
   
2. A car accident with a fight
   
3. A reported stolen car
   
4. A robbery with injuries

...then the phone rings asking for police urgently because someone is trying to break down the door, probably weapons involved....no officers available but this person NEEDS help...
...then one officer calls for backup in a firefight,
...then another phone rings with another open line - probably kids playing, maybe a murder.
Who gets the help?!

The situations are contrived to generate a compelling narrative and genuinely stress the user just like the real thing.

Concerns:

• When units are stacked at a hall/scene it is difficult to grab the one you want, often times I would send an ambulance to a medical call only to realize a few minutes later a police car is going and my ambulance is still sat at the last police/medical scene because I'd selected the wrong unit.
  
• Some of the dialogue tree options are frustratingly labeled like 'calm them down' = tell the caller to go intervene in a fight; I would interpret that as 'calm the caller down/reassure'...so I lost some big points.
  Others are some famously bad lines where I'm to tell the caller either 'I cant help you' or sarcastically 'do you want us to come shoot her'? I would never ere on the side of not sending, and I would never say something so unprofessional.
  
• Address is the most important piece of information on all calls ever; It should always be a top dialogue option.
  
• The tutorial is very limited and only shows 'this is your units' and 'this is your current game'...but not the intricacies of what any of the symbols mean. What are the squares above an ambulance? What happens when a unit transports then I redirect them to another call?
  
• Tasked units should really have a different colour, not just a different symbol (en route, arrived, tasked, in a firefight, etc)

Overall:
The price is right for a game of this caliber. I legitimately can't wait to load my city into the game to see if the units respond like mine really do in real life. :D

As a certified EMT/EMT Instructor with almost 5 years on the job, I must say it has been a pleasure to play this game. The atmosphere it creates and its ability to immerse you is unbelievable, even more so because it is still under development.
To the developers I send my regards and pray that under no circumstance they abandon this project.

I also wrote a community guide named "REAL LIFE EMT - How to act", check it out! Included real life videos I took.

Graphics: convey a nice professional and sleek atmosphere, simple but good;
Soundtrack: very promising, would expand it though;
Voice acting: surprisingly good, realistic and the only annoying thing is the address suppression but it is understandable;
Gameplay: absolutely awesome!!

- Make CPR and other instructions more interactive so players are encouraged to learn these simple techniques and have the incident rating affected by their proficiency;
- Create a mode for lay players / professionals where you can get calls from on-site teams asking for instructions on how to treat or proceed;
- After each shift you could show a newspaper with headlines concerning situations that happened during the day and how the emergency services dealt with them;
- Make 3D landmarks like the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge;
- More large scale events like the earthquake in San Francisco (amazingly well done);
- Allow people to tag emergency situations by order of priority for organization;
- Add more calls, especially more calls with uncooperative callers, random hang-ups and some with psych patients;
- Keyboard shortcuts for speed selecting and unit grouping (like The Sims);


- "Diabets" problem - in a random call name;
- Bug where you get stuck in a call, unable to continue conversation and you're forced to "ignore", thus losing points;
- Sacrifice Medal achievement is misspelled;

Again, thank you for creating this game and for actually doing a public service!

I received a caller from a man who found his deceased daughter after she overdosed on heroin. As I dispatched an ambulance and police cruiser to the scene he broke down in tears while describing to me how his little girl was cold as he held her lifeless body in his arms. Never before have I felt such sadness inside because of a video game.

You can save a cat instead of saving a dying man. 11/10

So, I like this kind of stuff. But here's why I like it even more.

Downloaded it, been playing.

Go upstairs. Wife has been unloading groceries. Leaves something on the stove burner, which then gets knocked into the "On" position.

The something catches fire. She loses her SH*T! With good reason.

I grab a towel, soak it, and put it out like it's nothing, ENTIRELY BECAUSE I SPENT LIKE AN HOUR STRAIGHT TELLING PEOPLE TO DO THAT IN THIS GAME.

11/10. Saved my stove, and wife thanked me. ;)

I like this game a lot.

Pro:
1) You can use almost any map in the world that has been drawn out.
2) Street names are accurate.
3) learn back ways in your home town to get around your city better and faster.
4) Many different types of cars and items. You can make Fire Rescue teams.
5) Fast paced

Cons:
1) Calls tend to repeat. With the same people calling in about the same things.
2) Zoning issues. Shop lifters in residential zones, or house fires in business districts. (don't take a map of a town you know to seriously)
3) Clicking between units sometimes gets lost, and you send the unit that you just sent to something else to a new spot even after you clicked a new unit.
4) Never know what are in the Updates. This game still does get updates, but when they come out there is no news about what was in it

5) This is just for Streamers. Twitch currently does not have a spot for this game, so if you stream it, it doesn't show up outside of people that follow you.

I work in the law enforcement field, and we're looking at using this game as an ice-breaker to teach our dispatchers about multi-tasking and how important it is to get things like an address/location first. On a personal note, it's been a great diversion. It could use a little more in the way of equipment and such; that aspect of the game doesn't seem very deep. But it's still fun!

A women was being chased by a killer while there was a cat stuck in a tree.. I did not hesitate to send all units to save the cat

Weirdly enough a woman was reported to have been killed shortly after

I opened the game and it automatically picked up that I'm in Chicago. I was so glad and stunned I was able to do an actual city vs a fiction one. I work at dispatch for a private ambulance in Chicago and was glad to see I could dispatch in Chicago. Amazing game, very realistic calls. You get stupid ones, and serious ones. Something dispatchers have to deal with lol. Hope more dialog and scenarios come. I would really love some hair raising goose bump giving calls. Love the game so far good work!

If you're thinking of buying this game. Do it. It's worth it. Especially if you are a dispatcher or plan on being a dispatch.