Now is your chance to pursue your lifelong dream of working in the emergency services! It’s your chance to stop the destruction, put out fires, and battle crime, or is it? Flashing Lights, an emergency services simulation game created by Nils Jarkins, is still in the early access phase, so please play it with the understanding that there will be some issues—in fact, a lot of bugs. In this open-world game, you can anticipate being in a variety of locations, such as driving through beautiful mountain terrains with extremely detailed flora, through industrial areas, or for long distances through a desert.
The first choice you must make when playing the game is whether you want to be a police officer, firefighter, or medic. But don’t worry if you are unsure and want to take on all three roles; you can quickly swap between them in-game via the menu. Then, you can select your sex, physique type, and uniform—I use the term “uniform” loosely because you can just select your hat style.
There aren’t many options available at first, but as you progress through the game and earn XP, you do unlock a few more. You may also choose the car you use, but other than for cosmetic reasons, there are no benefits to owning a different style or kind of vehicle.
Flashing Lights does get going right away and you get a call out within a few seconds, which is wonderful because it saves you from having to wait for the game to get going. However, the drawback is that there is no tutorial to explain what to perform. At the start of the game, I struggled for nearly five minutes to open my car door and get inside. Though you do get a few on-screen instructions for some things, such as when you get to the scene of your first call-out, it will advise you to pursue the suspect, it doesn’t explicitly state what you must do or how to go about accomplishing it. As you progress through the game, you receive numerous calls for a variety of dangerous situations, but after playing for about an hour, you quickly realise that each of the various emergency departments only has a dozen or so unique call-out scenarios, and you find yourself repeatedly using the same ones. Additionally, the medic appears to only have one type of call-out incident, which is a vehicle incident. The main thing that let me down was that you could only use a stun gun throughout the entire game, and on most missions, you only get one or two shots before the charge runs out. As a result, you are forced to come up with creative ways to apprehend your suspect while you wait for backup—if any—to show up.
Being in the early access stages, Flashing lights has bugs, and a good number of them regrettably stand out like sore thumbs. First of all, the controls are really sensitive. The slightest touch of the manoeuvre buttons will send your car flying off in that direction, which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to participate in a high-speed chase. When you fire your stun gun at a suspect, it may hit them clearly, but the stun gun may still indicate that you missed the target, which is irritating because you only receive a limited number of shots.
When you ask for backup, it either takes a very long time to come or never do since the vehicles are always stopped at red lights and several of the vehicles keep slamming through things as if they were phantom objects because several traffic lights in the game stay stuck on red for some reason. However, the two things that truly stood out to me were the game’s imbalanced aesthetics and its poor physics. On the one hand, the game’s other graphics are quite poor and block-like yet the graphics for the trees and other vegetation are astounding and meticulously detailed down to the last leaf or blade of grass. After that, there is physics! Jumping in the game is a unique feeling in and of itself; for some reason, it feels like your character is clearing a 4-foot-tall invisible obstacle as soon as you jump. You must see it to believe it. Then, if by chance you are struck by a car, your character will shoot into the air like an out-of-control spinning top and remain there for minutes until deciding to begin to descend to the ground!
Overall, it’s evident that the game needs work and that it’s still in the early access stages, but I think it has a lot of potentials if some problems are fixed and a few tweaks are made. Even though the game has three separate emergency departments that you may choose between, I believe that more callouts and even a few additional services, such as a medic helicopter or sea emergency service, should be added. Although internet play is possible and I think it would be fun to play with others, the lag is now so bad that I wouldn’t even attempt it again until it has been much improved. The game only now operates during the day, so adding a night and day cycle as well as other weather impacts would be fantastic and, in my opinion, would make the callouts a little more difficult. Fortunately, the game’s developers are still actively working on it; they often make updates that correct bugs and add new features. The game will get new weaponry in the upcoming version, which will add more variety than merely a stun gun and, in my opinion, drastically alter the gameplay.
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