Real Heroes: Firefighter (PS4)
When it comes to preserving media, books and movies are easy to reproduce, their important data independent of the hardware or medium it is experienced through. Video games have a heavy dependence on the platforms they choose to release for, so no matter the game, I will always support efforts to make old games available on new systems. However, even holding this view, I wasn’t quite prepared for the visual appearance of Real Heroes: Firefighter on PS4. Released first in 2009 for the Wii, it even looked dated back then with flat 2D looping textures for the fire and human characters looking like some of the uglier examples of PlayStation 2 model design. Despite being primitive from a visual design aspect, the graphics are functional even though they didn’t even take the opportunity to so much as lightly polish them for a modern system that can create photorealistic images. Real Heroes: Firefighter is definitely a poster child for the kind of game that doesn’t look good but the graphics still do their job enough that you won’t be impeded by it during play.
Real Heroes: Firefighter, despite appearances, promises players something close to a firefighting simulation, and while it can get a bit off the wall when you need to put out fires at a place like a laboratory with experimental technology, you still will get many of the experiences you’d hope to find on the job. You’ll need to whip out the fire ax to break down doors, the Halligan tool might need to pop open some crushed car doors, and of course you’ll spend a lot of time hosing down out of control blazes. It just so happens you’re a fresh recruit at a time when nature seems to be taking out its anger on a city with wildfires and earthquakes. You’ll need to both rescue trapped civilians and fight the fires in plenty of interesting locations, the game’s short campaign at least remaining varied by taking you to unique places like a movie theater, amusement park, and museum. Dodging active rides and protecting ancient artifacts makes the locations about more than the game just setting something new on fire, and while there are some mundane locations in the mix like a residential area, they manage to carry their weight by being sandwiched between excursions to more elaborate and imaginative destinations.
While the level variety is definitely commendable, the form the gameplay takes sadly is not. So much of your time will be spent wielding a fire extinguisher or fire hose and spraying at areas covered in the ugly 2D fires. Some areas will let you move on after you’ve only fought some of the blaze, and while this might seem disappointing initially, the fact these areas let you move onto a next task without quelling all the flames soon reveals itself as a blessing. When you do need to clear out all the fire in an area, it’s not at all an intense fight with an unpredictable natural force. Its spread is slow and mechanical, a tile of fire only able to add an extra tile next to it and spreading through a fairly regimented method. Rarely do you need to risk going into the flame for any reason, a lot of the action involving you standing to the side of the fire and pointing your extinguisher or hose at it and holding down the button to spray. When a fire tile disappears, you pan to the next fire tile, and that dull process can take quite a while in some of the larger areas. Your hose does at least have two spraying methods, the wider cone able to clear away multiple fires so long as you’re close but the focused stream faster and having a longer reach. Choosing which one to use does mean sometimes you need to think a little about your approach, but it definitely doesn’t help assuage the monotony of the missions where fighting fire is the main focus.
When you need to whip out your extra tools, things still aren’t much of an improvement. The axe breaks through whatever it needs to with a simple swing so it mostly just crops up to clear away roadblocks. There is a circular saw you sometimes get to use to carve your way through a wall, but you need to trace the marked out area, a task that can’t really be considered a challenge save when it’s being finicky on the angle you’re holding your tool at. The Halligan tool is similarly underwhelming but at least functionally reliable so it is more easily written off as something inoffensive, but it is surprising how much of one of the most intense jobs on the planet has been reduced down to mundane or outright boring. It’s little surprise that so much of the game needs to rely on its interesting locations to stay afloat considering your interactions with them are tame at best and tedious more often than not.
The mediocrity is lessened somewhat by the objectives where there is less of a focus on simply fighting fire with water. Rescue missions can often hit on interesting ideas like using the fire truck’s hose to keep a fire escape safe as a building is evacuated or needing to clear a path through flames in a pet store to help your partner save some puppies. Carrying people through an area as new explosions give birth to more flames add some simple excitement to an escape, and moments like trying to salvage as much film and art from a burning area give you a task that is augmented by smart use of your firefighting options instead of just spraying everything until every pixel of fire has disappeared. Some objectives can sometimes be unclear due to vague instructions or the arrows pointing you in the right direction not taking obstructions and walls into account, and it can on occasion be wiser to give up and plunge your character into the flames just to die and set things back to a more manageable state where the fire was much smaller. Your partners have plenty of personality to make the dialogue during a mission more than just commands, but personal touches and creativity in places still can’t help Real Heroes: Firefighter feel like an exciting fictionalization or authentic reproduction of the profession it’s attempting to emulate.
THE VERDICT: Putting aside the archaic but functional appearance of the game, Real Heroes: Firefighter still can’t provide an interesting adaptation of one of the most intense real world careers. Fighting fires is often reduced to a slow, low-risk, methodical activity and your other tools for the trade hardly leave an impact since they are used and put away without being challenged in any capacity. However, Real Heroes: Firefighter does have plenty of interesting locations that contextualize the job into some interesting objectives, and when you’re given some purpose to your actions beyond simply fighting fires or bashing down doors, Real Heroes: Firefighter nearly achieves some degree of entertaining play. It can’t quite cover up the long bland stretches of pointing your hose at every square foot of a large room, but at least the variation prevents the experience from boring the player to tears.
And so, I give Real Heroes: Firefighter for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. Had more time been spent on simply putting out every fire that must be dealt with, Real Heroes: Firefighter would certainly be an excruciatingly slow experience, but luckily you are herded along to new activities often enough that you won’t be completely trapped in a loop of boring jobs. While the game does ask us to admit that real life firefighting probably does have its periods of pointing a hose around an area until all the fire is gone, it does conversely provide the moments of action movie escapes and exciting set pieces, so its moments of dull execution feel out of place despite dominating most of the short experience. Only its dalliance with sci-fi in the laboratory truly breaks away from reality completely though, but whether you expect extensive liberties taken or an accurate reproduction, firefighting here just isn’t captured in a way that can keep the play interesting.
The PlayStation 4 port of a game nearly ten years old offered an opportunity not to just touch up the game’s appearance, but it could have addressed some of the gameplay stagnation or tidied up some of the objective design. I can’t condemn the game for simply being a port to new hardware and I am thankful for any case of making a game more available, but Real Heroes: Firefighter was a bad game in 2009 and unfortunately still is now that it has been brought back in 2020. If preservation was the point I laud the effort, but it feels like it was rereleased with little thought or effort put into bringing it to new audiences when there is certainly room to turn this into the exciting firefighting simulation it could be if the basics were expanded upon appropriately.