HERO Unit Review

HERO Unit is a truly great title. With simple choice-based gameplay and a strong emotional heart, the game manages to deliver a meaningful and enjoyable experience. It’s only drawback is that it ends too quickly.

Taking the role of a 911 dispatcher in the Hotline Emergency Response Operators (H.E.R.O.) Unit, you’re tasked with responding to calls and deciding how to deal with them. How you respond to callers, when to dispatch the police or even whether to believe them or not is within your choices, and those choices matter -- each case has at least two different conclusions, and most have over five endings. That variety makes each call a self-contained personal history, and HERO Unit does a wonderful job of translating an emotional situation via text and simulating dialogue.

Way better than George Lucas ever did.

The writing is solid, although some cases -- especially the first one -- have some pretty glaring language errors. They tend to improve over time, and the game clearly wasn’t written by a social media aficionado who lacked knowledge of proper writing guidelines. The game is able to effectively express both the urgency of each situation and make the calls sound realistic, and the way it conveys that reality through text is its greatest strength -- within one minute of starting the game I felt myself emotionally invested on the calls I received, and could only put the game down once I finished it.

And finished I did, in little less than 30 minutes. The game is too short, and all cases can be comfortably completed within half an hour. While each mission does have at least two separate outcomes and there are 70 extra endings to unlock, the brunt of content is still the same -- the mission’s basic framework is shared, and while the choices change the developments a little, it still involves replaying a good part of each call.

The hugely creative "Officer HERO" is an example; you can type your name when the game starts.

HERO Unit has great UI, easily one of the best I’ve ever seen on a mobile game. Extremely smooth, the interface allows for all information to be accessed intuitively and always communicates gameplay in a clear and concise manner; text is well presented, with proper spacing separating entries and a change of colours indicating different actions performed. I ran into no bugs, and as a premium game, it rightly has no in-app purchases nor ads to be found anywhere.

With a lovely gameplay, charming graphical interface and brilliant concept, HERO Unit is easily worth a recommendation. It is a fun, effective example of how a mobile game can be done and proof that the platform has a lot to offer, if only developers would stop being mercenaries and focus on actually producing quality content. I only reiterate the need for extra proofreading and the urgent addition of more missions. Replay value is a great thing to have, but the game could use a bit more actual content to pad out the experience further.