A good game worthy of your time and money.
Trauma center has a descent storyline that I won't spoil here other than to say it is a story of medical terrorism and a young doctors rise in skill. One nice thing is that a tangent story develops giving you a sort of glimpse into the other side of things. It is a relatively short play, requiring 16 hours for me to advance to the end.
There is no voice acting so you'll be following the storyline by doing some reading. It is a good thing that you can skip the text between surgeries if you are redoing something because some of the text could be overly verbose at times leaving you wanting to just get on with the action.
The story will lead you through interesting scenarios such as handling bombs, or dealing with low light in a tunnel or turbulence on an airplane.
You will get to play as different surgeons, though they are all essentially the same and you switching only serves to drive the storyline forward.
General game play involves some trial and error as you work to find a pattern or a weak spot so you can advance in the operation, which tend to resemble mini puzzles. There is always a "time attack" feel to it as you race to find and cure the problem while keeping the patients vitals up.
There are three difficulty levels: Easy, Normal and Hard. Playing through the game on Normal didn't pose too much of a problem though I see how increasing the difficulty would sure make things harder. There is actually a fourth level which is Extreme, but that is all i'll say about that.
The controls are great, using the Wii motes interesting capabilities. The game utilizes twisting action on things like bone fragments and screws, push and pull with a defibrillator. The whole time, you are pointing the Wii mote at the screen while using the Nunchuck primarily for instrument selection. There is also a special move that is accomplished by pointing the Wii mote at the screen and drawing a certain image.
The graphics are good but certainly don't dazzle. Objects are usually overemphasised giving them a cortoonish feel, while the characters are all static anime-style images. But you don't have time to oogle the visuals anyways, you are saving patients remember!!
The music is ok, it definitely gives you that urgent feeling as you operate, adding to the tension. Sounds like a constant beeping heart monitor and the crunch of a mistake will have you stressed out more than once.
Overall this was a great game that is fun to play. Quite different from any game I've played which was quite welcomed. I can only see this series getting better with the additions of a few things and expanding on this great concept. I have high hopes and am look forward to the upcoming sequel, Trauma Center: New Blood.
The clincher is that I can definitely see myself plugging this game back in even after having beaten it, if only to see if I could score a better ranking here and there.
With that I will say is that if you go out and buy this game you won't be disappointed.