Basic to a fault
Neo Harbor Rescue Squad is a simple game, combining aspects of a visual novel and simple arcade game together, to mixed results. Despite its relatively short length (about 4-6 hours), the game surprisingly drags at times, and its gameplay mechanics soon grow tiresome and repetitive, despite the plethora of different minigames that show up.
The game’s narrative is simple enough and sees you whisked off to a fictional town where you’re tasked with working as a rookie paramedic. It’s your first day on the job, and the relentless onslaught of different patients doesn’t stop. You’re joined by your captain, who helps show you the ropes, while leaving you to work through 15 different missions, listed as emergencies.
Around the minigames (which we’ll circle back to shortly), there’s an ongoing story surrounding the Neo Harbour Rescue Crew itself, who are at odds with the cocky fire department. The two teams don’t like one another, and that inevitably causes friction to grow.
The cases generally tend to bleed into one another, with a fair few involving fires in different buildings to justify the fire department being at the same place as the paramedics. The characters are generally quite colourful but they’re also pretty archetypal too. Don’t expect many morally grey characters here; the fire department are the bad guys and the Harbor Crew are the good guys.
The story develops quite well, with a good message about using empathy and kindness while dealing with the public. There are different dialogue choices too with the illusion of branching paths, but to be honest everything railroads you into the same outcome.
Whether you pass a performance review midway through the game for example, is nowhere near as significant as the story makes it out to be. Regardless of what happens, the story will progress in the same way.
Around the visual novel aspects, the bread and butter of gameplay revolves around a series of minigames. This isn’t like Mario Party though, the games here are very simplistic and there’s not too much variety of creativity involved. Most of the time you’ll be button mashing, hitting buttons at the right time or twirling your analog stick.
Each Emergency will see you whisked off to different areas, with the later missions much more lengthy and frantic than the simple ones early on. Patients will be lying on the ground that you need to select and engage with, which in turn start the minigames. On the “Scene” view however, you also have multiple screens to traverse, with areas blocked off by locked doors you need to lockpick or windows to smash to access more patients.
Generally there will be between 2-7 patients in each area, and there are timers for how much HP these guys have left, which will whittle down over time. To combat some of the chaos, you are granted shields to temporarily protect patients from damage, and this adds an element of strategy to the fold. You see, some missions will be very time-sensitive and if too many of your patients die (by running out of HP), it’ll be game over. Strategy is something hard to come by in this game though, and despite the triage system, the only difficulty will come from which minigames you’re dealt.
When minigames are literally all you do across the entire playtime, this makes the game incredibly simplistic and resting solely on its story to drive this one forward. The minigames have absolutely no instructions beyond vague prompts on-screen too, and it’ll take a few goes before you figure out how some of them work. Picking glass out of cuts for example, requires you to lift up glass then place inside a tray. If you fail any part of this though by moving too far left and right, or even miss placing the glass on the tray, it’ll be a failure.
Another time you’ll need to use Smelling Salts and move your hand side to side under the patient’s nose. You have to be quite meticulous with this though because too close to the nose, or holding it under the nose won’t work.
The hitboxes for these games is something that constantly hounds this one. The margin for error with button mashing games for example, will punish you if you’re even a tiny fraction below the designated spot… but it’s all hunky dory if you’re way over that mark. Meanwhile, needles don’t need to be exact while injecting patients, but placing bandages around puncture marks needs to be very precise.
There’s an inconsistency to these that become more prevalent the longer you play. And given a lot of these minigames tend to repeat on a frequent basis, you’ll find it quite repetitive in a hurry. The game does mix things up with the later Emergency missions, with extra minigames coming into the fold, and multiple-level minigames requiring you to complete four different games back to back before completing them, which at least helps.
The animations are quite quirky and the characters certainly have some unique personalities, but both the sound effects and music are basic, to say the least. There’s inconsistent voice acting, with a few lines and statements read out, but mostly reserved to silence or simple grunts and laughs. There’s a really annoying “bounce” sound effect that’s used when characters speak and now that I’ve mentioned it, you’re going to notice it throughout your playtime!
Where the game is more imaginative however, is with its scenes and backgrounds. Each area around town is pretty unique and the isometric view is a nice touch too. You only control a cursor across the scenes, rather than moving your Rookie from patient to patient though, while the different NPCs you encounter all start to blend together, with the same character model used for multiple people (watch out for the old woman!)
To be honest, Neo Harbor Rescue Squad’s biggest strength is also its Achille’s heel too. Narrowing its focus into a visual novel style, with very basic minigames, feels like a contradiction of ideas that grows stale quickly. The game is crying out for a split screen mode to compete against your friends, while the general level design and saving patients could have been perfect fodder for a medical version of something akin to Overcooked. Alas, that is not this game.
Neo Harbor Rescue Squad keeps it simple but does so at the detriment of its own enjoyment. The game struggles to really lift itself up from the basic perception of this being a glorified mobile game without ads, and across the hours you’ll spend playing this one, it’s hard to shake that same feeling. Unfortunately the most urgent patient that needs saving here is the Neo Harbor Rescue Squad itself. Play for a few hours but
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