Neo Harbor Rescue Squad Review

Here to help!

When Neo Harbor Rescue Squad first appeared on my screen, I knew I had to play it. It drew me in initially with its bright cover art, it hooked me when I read the game summary detailing that you play as a paramedic, and I let it reel me in when I checked out the trailer and saw it’s minigame based. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a specific type of medical sims and minigames. Plus, this did remind me of the minigames in Gamehouse games and Warioware; and how there is a certain medical visual novel that I’ve been waiting to release for years (and I hope is still being worked on). I actually was not expecting Neo Harbor Rescue Squad to release this year, but that doesn’t mean I still wasn’t excited! So, how did this one turn out?

In Neo Harbor Rescue Squad, you play as a newbie who is just joining the Rescue Squad in Neo Harbor. Since we play as the new rookie, the character we play as is thus dubbed as Rookie. Though, whether that is his actual name is unclear. Rookie is so stoked to be a part of the Rescue Squad as he always dreamed of and wanted to help those in need. Plus, he’s quite a fanboy for ambulance vehicles. In fact, when Rookie first arrived no one was there to greet him and he went to admire their ambulance vehicles before his soon to be Captain tripped over his equipment bag. Oops. Well, after assuring that you are indeed the new recruit and not someone snooping around (much to the confusion of Rookie and probably us the player), we get to meet the whole Rescue Squad team. There’s Queenie Tam who is the hotheaded, but caring captain who trains and accompanies Rookie on most calls, Mei Mei the lead dispatcher and expert in communications who has a pension for (bad) jokes, and Finn the talking dolphin and genius engineer who likes to roast those around him. Yep, a talking dolphin. You do meet the Chief and get a new recruit later on, but it’s quite the small team. A small team that you soon learn is also a tight knit one that Rookie finds himself fitting in pretty easily.

As Rookie is being trained and getting the hang of things, it soon becomes apparent why Queenie was so defensive in the beginning. You’d think an emergency response team wouldn’t have these problems that the Rescue Squad has, but they sadly do. It turns out that Neo Harbor’s news reporter Betty Woo has made it her job to curb stomp the Rescue Squad’s reputation while uplifting the Fire Department’s reputation. Betty Woo seems to always be right there to capture anything that can be used against them whether it’s inner squabbles, capturing one of Queenie’s hotheaded moments, or twisting what happened with editing. She never broadcasts the good the Rescue Squad does unlike how she treats the Fire Department where she only reports on them positively and ignored actions that would reflect badly on them. This makes the Fire Department the darlings of Neo Harbor and the Rescue Squad black sheep as they’re struggling with trying to get more funding and citizens just not really wanting you there. This also has a knock on effect of there being a rivalry between the Rescue Squad and the Fire Department.

So, throughout the game, you’ll get to see the Rescue Squad’s journey of trying to improve their reputation, dealing with Betty Woo’s slander, seeing the amusing rivalry between the two emergency response teams, and getting to the root of a mystery of why Betty Woo is doing this. All while they’re dealing with the various emergencies that get called in and getting closer as a team the longer they’re working together.

I quite liked the story here. It’s lighthearted, fun, and has some rivalry and angst toppings. It’s nice getting to know the others in the Rescue Squad in between being out on calls and the rivalry between them and the Fire Department was interesting to see. Queenie was one character that could have easily been unlikeable, but she’s not as it’s made clear her being mean or hotheaded nature is because she cares a lot and she’s tired of her squad being dealt the short end of the stick. Especially considering who their Chief is. I actually liked everyone on the Rescue Squad and while they do have their moments, you can tell that they do see each other as a family. The Fire Department characters were written well also and I found it interesting how they progressed as you get further in. By the way, I liked Naomi the most out of all the Fire Department characters. I did like how the game was structured as well. Each chapter is titled with “Emergency” rather than “Chapter” and true to this each one is focused on an emergency that arised or a situation that happened. That doesn’t mean there will only be one emergency scene as each chapter does still feature multiple.

I also think they did a good job foreshadowing the reveal that happens at the end of the game. The whole time you’re wondering why, especially with the bizarre circumstance of a hate campaign against an emergency response team. Betty Woo serves as a good hate sink as she’s slandering your squad and the hints are dropped to make you wonder what’s going on. As you’re nearing the end, you get more definitive hints that you can make a guess. Heck, the last hint pretty much reveals it and the game respects its players to have paid attention and pick up on the subtle aspects. Which I liked. I managed to guess it, but the reveal still is pretty good. All in all, this aspect of the story was, in my opinion, done really well.

Now onto the gameplay! Neo Harbor Rescue Squad tells its story through its visual novel segments and there are actually dialogue choices here that will pop up every so often. Depending on the situation, they’re used to see if you’ve been paying attention, to help convince citizens to let you guys help, or just choosing what Rookie will say (with a couple instances letting you pick all of them as it’s being used as a way to get to know a character more). Most of these do have a right answer and while some are obvious, some aren’t so much.

Between the visual novel segments, you’ll be going to emergency scenes where the focus is on minigames. Once Mei Mei receives a call and sends it to you, it’s time to roll. Each one will send you to the map where you have to select the destination before you get there. While this does seem like it’s just used to show you the town map and give you a way to visualize where and how far away the destination is, there are points where you’ll have multiple emergencies at the same time. You don’t have to worry about picking the right choice based on which one sounds the most severe, but it just lets you choose which one you want to do first. I do also like the short blurb when you’re over a destination, giving you a little preview on what’s to come and they can be quite funny. The screens that transition from visual novel to gameplay segments can be funny as well.

Anyway, once you’re on the scene there is quite a few things to take into account. You have to stay calm, access the scene, and constantly triage those who were unfortunately involved and need help. Each patient has different injuries and you have to determine who needs help first and who can wait. After all, you can only deal with one person at a time. Not to mention that emergencies can involve multiple areas and you can only see one screen at a time. Luckily, the Rescue Squad does have some handy equipment to help you balance the various things you need to balance. There’s the view dock where you’ll be able to see how many areas (or screens) an emergency is encompassing, how many patients are in each, and when they take damage or on low health.

You also have tech that automatically scans everyone on a scene and displays their health and the treatments that you need to do. Each treatment has a meter that depletes and when it does, the patient will take damage from their injuries. Each injury causes different amounts of damage, which you aren’t privy to but you can pick it up as you play more, and of course you don’t want patients to go down to zero health. Luckily, completing a treatment successfully will heal the patient and you do get a preview on how much. Which can help for those with low health to stabilize them. However, you do also have to take into account how long a treatment takes as the meters still tick down when in a minigame and damage is dealt once it ends and you’re back on the triage scene. Once you get into Act 2, a new mechanic is added where you can shield a patient from damage for a couple seconds. Shields are definitely helpful and that’s why each scene only has a limited amount.

It’s no surprise that treatments here are all minigames. They all vary depending on the treatment type, but they all take a simple, fast-paced approach. Treatments also do share similar controls or are reskins. This does seem to take on a more Warioware approach, though, as all you have to go off of in terms of what you need to do when you first encounter a minigame is the control scheme and a little tip. These tips vary in being helpful enough to where you’ll know what to do, to causing some confusion on what you really need to do. Anyway, what you’ll be doing just depends on the minigame. Some will have you using the trigger buttons like the defibrillator minigame where you press them when the indicators are in the highlighted section. Some will have you use the regular face buttons like mashing the button shown to keep pressure on a bleeding wound. Some will use the thumbsticks like flushing someone’s eye out. And finally others will use a combination like removing glass shards from a patient’s limbs and minigames where you have to move and place something or scrubbing a patient’s limb. All minigames do take a certain amount of time to do, either have a timer or give you a certain amount of tries, and there are complex treatments where you’ll be doing a series of 2-4 treatments.

There are also non-treatment minigames, like the minigames that will let you gain access to a blocked area or when you need to clean and stock the ambulances.

The game also does adjust the difficulty of these minigames by adjusting how much time you have to do them, how many inputs you have to do (just by one or two), how many fails you can get before it’s considered failed, and how fast the key aspect to it is. Like the hard version of the bandaging minigame will have the slider travel faster.

After each scene, you’ll be graded by how well you did. Basically, if you failed any treatments, if you failed any patients (aka letting any go down to zero health), and how long it took you. It also does seem like you get a small bonus if you used no Shields. Though, sometimes, I really wanted to know what time you needed for an S rank. So many scenes where I did perfectly, but only got an A rank due to the time spent being taken into account.

You can actually fail a scene, which I’m pretty sure is what the top bar is. I only got a failed scene once, but I have no idea why as it just suddenly popped up right after I completed a treatment. You can just restart the scene

I really liked the gameplay here. There are some annoyances that I’ll touch upon soon, but I did like how you have to strategize which patient to take care of first, which treatment to do first, and making sure you’re checking out all the screens of a scene. I did also like the minigames and the inclusion of ones that aren’t treatment based. The ones where you kick down or axe a door felt pretty powerful and I enjoyed doing it more than I liked to admit. Personally, I didn’t find the emergency scenes too stressful until the end game. With the ones in the final chapter being impossible or near impossible to do without failing patients due to the sheer amount of patients, treatments, and blocked entryways. And I tried, I restarted those scenes multiple times and couldn’t save everyone even with using the glitch where the game saves the state of the entryways as being opened despite having the prompt.

It is recommended to play Neo Harbor Rescue Squad with a controller and, after trying out keyboard and mouse, I definitely agree. Controller seems to give a bit more oomph, which is much needed for certain minigames, and mouse is so unwieldy. I don’t know if it’s just my computer, but it’s like you put your mouse sensitivity way up. And there’s no mouse sensitivity setting to adjust here. Granted though, you can just use the keyboard and while I did play the whole game with a controller (excluding the few times I tested out keyboard controls) I do feel certain minigames would be easier with a keyboard. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I do also recommend playing with a controller, it won’t hurt to try out both and see which one fits you most. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

I do have a handful of negatives that I found this game to have and most of them are sadly tied to the gameplay (and sadly hurt my enjoyment of the game). There are a few minigames that aren’t as clear which may cause confusion. Like the assist breathing minigame says to squeeze and release the triggers gently, but if you’re like me and playing with a Playstation controller your mind may go to the adaptive triggers. You’re just meant to fully press down and fully release when you’re meant to. I did think you had to press and hold the button at first for the stop a bleeding wound minigame. The tourniquet is also a tricky one as the ring doesn’t stop when you stop, making you overshoot. The removing glass shards minigame may cause confusion on why the patient is getting hurt even though the glass isn’t anywhere near the edges of the wound. I didn’t know this until I checked out a video, but you’re supposed to pull straight up. Which makes sense, but I would still have the patient be hurt. I did figure out that the farthest point you can grab it basically gets it all the way out, which helped me get successful treatments. However, the worse one is the smelling salts minigame. It’s not so much of being confused on what to do, but being confused why you didn’t pass it. It’s impossible to pass it on a timer that isn’t the maximum amount of time you can have and the majority of the time you’ll get this minigame will have a fast timer. So this one is pretty much a guaranteed fail whenever it shows up. From what I can guess, maybe the stat that determines if you pass or fail a treatment wasn’t adjusted so it’s not adapting to the different timer lengths.

Other than that, there were just some minigames where I noticed my inputs not being detected which can be annoying. The minigames where you have to press both triggers would often not detect that I did press it in time. The treat chemical burns minigame also sometimes didn’t pour for me despite being sure I was the right distance away. Making me find the specific sweet spot it wanted me at and hope I was quick enough to washing away all the burns. Some minigames also have a weird ending where it waits for a couple beats before doing the successful treatment visual effects and moving on. I did also notice that sometimes, the bandaging minigame will say I damaged the patient even though I’m still in the slider.

I do also want to again mention how impossible all the scenes are in the last chapter. They need to be adjusted so treating all patients can be doable cause I honestly don’t believe it is. Maybe it was intentional to a point, but you still get graded and there’s an achievement tied to the average score you get. It’s especially not possible if you don’t discover the glitch where the game remembers that an entryway is opened if you did the minigame to open it up before restarting the scene.

I actually almost forgot to include this, but I did also notice towards the end of my playthrough that if a patient as multiple needed treatments and if a treatment you’re doing is almost fully depleted when you started it, it will still damage their health bar even though you did it successfully. This isn’t a big deal most of the time, but it definitely is in the end game and it can be so annoying. The game does take a couple seconds after you get out of a minigame to clear the one you just did and to apply the damage for the meters that depleted while you were in the minigame in that order, but for some reason it does it before it’s cleared in this situation I described. And I know it happens as there’s either no other meter isn’t depleted, or the patient gets damaged twice when they should have only been damaged once.

All of these just need a patch to fix and I do hope they are. Like I said before, all of these are connected to the gameplay and they did hurt my enjoyment of the game.

Other than that, I just have a total nitpick which I wish there were at least more character designs for the citizens you talk to during the visual novel sections. It was quite weird going from one location to another and seeing the same character sprite as I assumed they were the same person. When in reality it’s two different people. I would have liked if at least the hair colors were different if a same character sprite is going to appear in the same chapter. I lowkey loved how unhinged the injuries were, and it does help that having a talking dolphin does lower the realism enough for this to not matter much, but there was one scene where it specifically stated the injuries during the visual novel segment and in the triage segment they were totally different injuries. I did also have at least two achievements not unlock that I’m pretty sure should have. Lastly, throughout the whole game I had a glitch where the game would remember the ambiance and carry it over for multiple scenes and the only way to reset it was to close the game. I’m not sure if it was just my computer, but it was a bit annoying.

To end on a more positive note, I did like the art, music, and writing style. The art was what drew me in initially and that’s because I loved how colorful it is and I did like the character designs. Though, it does shine in its environments and I loved being able to see a top-down view of a scene during the triage segments. Plus, there are some funny positions that they put waiting patients in. The music was good and definitely brings in that high energy that you would expect. The sound effects were done well also. I also quite liked the writing style. It fit my own personal preference and it worked well with the short text box length. There were just times I didn’t notice the speaker switched, but that’s more on me than the game. Lastly, while there weren’t a lot of voice lines here, I believe characters have one or two situational lines, I did like them. Enough to wish that this game was partially voiced as there are some scenes that would have been glorious with that extra oomph.

Verdict

Despite some annoyances, I enjoyed Neo Harbor Rescue Squad. I didn’t know what to expect aside from the minigames, which I knew I would like, and I was pleasantly surprised with the fun storyline and how it progressed. I did also enjoy the minigames, despite the annoyances that happened, and liked how you have to strategize who to treat and what to treat first on the triage screen. I was a bit unsure about the price for this game, but I do think it’s worth picking up. The length turned out to be perfect both for the story and making sure the gameplay doesn’t get too repetitive (taking breaks and playing the game over a couple days does help also).

All in all, I do recommend Neo Harbor Rescue Squad if the focus on the fast-paced minigames is up your alley and ready for a fun paramedic drama storyline.