This game was originally covered as part of our Nindie Round Up series that sought to give coverage to a wider breadth of Switch eShop games beyond our standard reviews. In an effort to make our impressions easier to find, we're presenting the original text below in our mini-review format.

Perhaps the most realistic police game ever, this simulation puts you behind the camera and the phone, allowing you to take calls, instruct the emergency services, and prioritise incidents based on their severity. It’s all done from a top-down perspective of the map, showing you where your units are patrolling, with blue, red, and white incidents popping up over the course of a game, requiring specific services for each.

911 Operator's gameplay steadily builds tension as the night progresses and more and more incidents appear, with limited units to dispatch. You must make the call (literally) and decide whether the cat stuck up the tree is of higher priority for the fire brigade than the burning house down the road. Of course, rejecting an incident will hurt your reputation, so it’s a balancing act.

Incidents, however, are not just limited to flashing icons on the screen, as you must also take calls and handle them appropriately. The calls are incredibly lifelike and encourage you to actually act responsibly; whether that be scolding an irresponsible pocket dial, or trying to decipher information from a man slowly losing breath while stuck underneath a car. It doesn’t glamourise or make light of the situations it presents, which is both admirable and educational. However, this does make the game a tad repetitive. After you’ve been playing for a while, you’ll have likely taken the same call a handful of times.

Presentation-wise, it’s a bit dull. It’s a very basic map screen, with stock generic icons representing each of the three services. Their paths are represented via lines on the screen which are incredibly thin, so it might be preferable to play this on the TV, rather than the Switch screen. That also goes for the audio, which can be a little hard to hear when projected from the console speakers.

On the whole, however, 911 Operator is a fun way to pass the time and its realistic depictions of how to use the emergency services make it all the more commendable. It is, however, repetitive and may not be picked up again after an initial play-through.