Looking for a non-casual game for the Wii? Here it is.
1. It is not a Medical or Surgery Simulator
2. It is set in the future a little bit
3. It is not a graphical powerhouse via the story line.
4. If you have a shaky hand, you are screwed with this game.
5. Also, if you played Trauma Center for the DS, you can skip it.
Here is what it IS good at though:
- Action, fast paced, pointer driven puzzle game.
- Replay value comes from high score achievements
- It's hard or easy depending how you want it.
- IT's extremely hard if you are up for the challenge.
You play as one of two doctors throughout the game. Mostly just one of them, Derek Stiles. The story starts awkwardly if you expected #1 as the doctor is working with live patients out of the gate and has to be walked through the procedures by the nurse attendant. Each operation lasts 1-10 minutes depending on how good you are and multiple operations are grouped into Levels.
Each operation comes with a opening and closing story line that is bare bones dialog, with picture stills popping in and out based on who is talking. The picture stills will change based on emotion attempted to be conveyed (anger, shy, embarrassment, etc), but the dialog portrays the emotion enough that the picture actually makes you laugh as they seem over the top. The good of this whole bit is, you don't waste a lot of time in dialog, and once you have seen it once, you can skip straight to the operation. Some characters seem pushed into the game, and the dialog unfolds too fast in some places making it awkwardly funny. This is definitely the weakest point of game if you expect too much. The storyline itself is simple enough, but fits in why you are doing all of these operations.
The core of the game comes in during the operations. You use the Wiimote pointer to direct all the action. You have to accomplish the goal of the operation, without making mistakes, and keep your patients 'life' meter above 0 at all times. As you operate there is the pop-ins and dialog to help push along what is going on in the operation (you can auto-skip these too and they won't get in the way). The first few levels are operations that attempt to imitate operations in an actual hospital, broken bones, replacing a kidney, etc. But the fun starts when you find out you have 'the healing' touch, or the ability to slow down time. (the other doctor you play with, can't slow time, but rather has health regen ability as she works). Some levels will cause you to think a lot about how to move on, either by playing with all your tools or getting lucky and trying to reproduce the results. But, once you figure it out you can redo these levels without getting stuck.
Each operation is ranked C, B, A, S and on hard mode XS. Sometimes it is very easy to go from a C to an A or S, and on some levels absolute perfection will only get you an A unless you slow down a bit to earn more points to capture that S. But this is where the extreme level of play is for this game. You can breeze through the main story line in 4-6 hours. But if you are going to get an S or A in all operations on all difficulties plan on investing a lot of time and getting perfect at the Wiimote pointing scheme.
Once you finish out the main story line you get a bonus level of operations with a new difficultly, 'extreme', to try your skills against but if you can't pull off Hard mode you will need to practice a bit first. So mastery and full completion of this game is something only obtainable by a driven gamer.
As far as bugs go, there weren't any I saw. On the rare occasion I have done things so fast in an operation that it appeared to get 'hung' when really I just needed to break out the 'gel' and spray it around a bit more and found a wound hidden on an edge or something. And sometimes it felt like I was in the healing touch, but wasn't and one level requires it to finish out. Just remember that once you know how to invoke the HT you can do it manually once per operation.
All in all, if you didn't play the DS version of this game, you need to play it now, if nothing else than to see that all games don't have to be a platformer or a shooter to be intense with the gameplay. Rent it if you must to at least see if you like it.