Trauma Center: Under the Knife

The Good
Trauma Center explores a very untapped genre in video games, putting players in the scrubs of surgeon whose objective is to save lives. The game itself goes almost hand and hand with the Nintendo DS's concept of touch screen gameplay, where players use their DS Stylus pen as a scalpel or other surgical instruments.

Players get to perform a variety of surgical tasks in order to save virtual lives, combined with good visuals that clearly indicate what is going on (along with some well drawn characters to go with them). What helps to draw the experience together though is soundtrack itself, drawing you in with its intensity and quick pace.

The Bad
Trauma Center is NOT an easy game, even in the beginning. While the initial two levels offer a solid walk through, later levels off almost no help at all, especially when it comes to brand new procedures. Several times when performing an operation while zoomed in, an objective (weather it be a tumor or a hemorrhage) will appear near the top of the screen or the bottom. This becomes a problem because the game has a hard time recognizing when you attempting to treat those areas, and often times you can't follow through with it unless you zoom out and zoom in on the area. This can lose you significant time and also cause the loss of a huge chunk of the patient's vitals, which can start to get very frustrating. In short, sometimes it feels like the game is asking perfection of you that you simply cannot provide with the tools you are given.

While the sound may immerse you deeper into the game help to up the stakes of a surgery, the characters and story on the other hand, don't. Often times the characters monologue to themselves about nonsensical gibberish and in no way attempt to make themselves more interesting or compelling. In most cases, unless it involves the vague but necessary medical briefings, 9 out of 10 times you will find yourself skipping over these cut scenes.

The Bottom Line
Trauma Center offers something very different from the typical DS Library, instead of a quirky puzzle game or a very casual game, Trauma Center is a nerve racking race against time in an attempt to save virtual lives. For many, the endless bouts of frustration and battling with the games controls will be too much of a turn off than what the very original ideas can counter with. As it stands, Trauma Center is more of an exhibition of what the Nintendo DS is capable of and a display of unique ideas rather than a fully enjoyable game. Consider playing it for its experimental ideas but be ready for some frustrating moments.

The Good
Trauma Center: Under the Knife is one of the most successful games of Nintendo DS touching games, and that's because the concept is really attractive: to become a professional doctor and saving your patients using your stylus as a scalpel.

The concept is good enough for many different players, but the main objective was to create an enjoyable game about something that's not fun. Maybe that's why in Trauma Center we have a pure fictional storyline, with many invented pathologies and a deadly virus called GUILT which is the main enemy in the game. To success we have many different surgical stuff as well as the help of our assistant nurse which will tell us what to do many times (hey, who's the doctor here?).

The game has many surgeries and some surprises during the story, like puzzles that has nothing to do with medical operations that really work as something different in the game. The game needs many time because of its difficulty (we'll have to restart most of the operations), and we can play each surgery from the main menu to gain a good score, which is something good for the replayability.

All the technical aspects of the game works fine. Graphics, music and all those things are good, but they're something unnecessary in this kind of games where gameplay and storyline is more important.

The Bad
Storyline is like a soap opera, all the characters are connected with all the things in the game, including family relationships in a fictional world of bio-war. I don't know if I'd like more a game focused in real situations, but I have that feeling. There's a strange impersonal essence all over the game, something's wrong with it because I've never empathised with Doctor Stiles, and you don't feel like you're there.

The medical stuff works fine, but there are some big problems. To start with, the magnifier's the worst tool ever. With that you can zoom in or out wherever you need, but it doesn't work. To make it work you must draw a circle with your stylus, but the game has big problems to understand your movements with the magnifier, and you'll have to repeat that circle to zoom in or out many times. I've failed many interventions because of that. To suck up some fluids you'll need the drain, which is another tool hat doesn't work good enough. To use it you must move your stylus from down to up, but the problem is that some fluids are in the top of the screen, so, you can do that movement. Anyway, nothing as bad as the magnifier, for sure. One last thing about the tools, with the healing touch we gain extra time to face the intervention, the problem is that when we choose it the game needs some time to understand what we're doing, and we can fail some surgeries because of that.

The game's really difficult and it's not just because some tools are frustrating. We're used to easier games right now but Trauma Center's not one of those. That's not something bad at all, we don't have much time and we can't doubt any time as if we were a real doctor, but the problem appears when you fail because of the strange programming of the game. A single GUILT virus could hurt our patient many times, and it's possible that the virus does it constantly, so, you don't have any reaction time to face that (even with the healing touch) and you'll fail not because of your incompetence.

Trauma center's not an enjoyable game to me. It's good to play it a few hours, but then it becomes more and more difficult and you'll start having a bad time with the game. If you start the game finish it as soon as possible because your assistant will help you only at the beginning. If you leave some time the game and then you take it up again you won't know what to do in some situations.

The Bottom Line
A good concept for a not enjoyable at all game, featuring characters from the worst soap opera ever, surgery tools that doesn't work and really frustrates you and a nice "simulation" of this unexplored kind of games. If you're looking for the definitive touch game this is not, but it works for a few hours as a good game. A wasted opportunity anyway.