A game that only Nintendo dares to produce.
Unfortunately the story is told through text and still-images. It works and the dialog is sharply written, but still it would be a high time to say goodbye to this style of story-telling. There is no voice acting what so ever aside a few words like “Doctor!” and “Let´s begin the operation.”
Graphics do their job, but don´t expect to see any HD quality here. Still this game is colorful and bright to look at. Unfortunately the frame rate takes a serious hit every time when there´s a lot of movement on screen. This is very annoying, but luckily it doesn´t happen that often. Music is different comparing to other types of games: it brings memories from the early years of this first decade of 21 st century. Music and sound is not going to blow you away, but you may find yourself humming the songs even after you´ve stopped playing.
Controls are almost perfect and most of all intuitive. Everything works as it should and almost always as precise as you would want them to work. Only thing that doesn´t work perfectly is the way you choose your equipment by using the analog stick in your Nunchuk controller. When in a hurry it´s very easy to miss what you were trying to choose as your working equipment.
Trauma Center Second Opinion is basically a puzzle game that consists of many independent mini games. Each operation has a strict time limit and multiple phases to perform. Usually I hate games that have time limits, but this time it´s no problem at all, because you´re way too busy doing to surgery itself and usually time does not run out. One surgery takes about three to five minutes, but there´s a lot of them. It takes around 10 hours or so to finish the game and after that you can try again by using a higher difficulty.
Sometimes there´s some irritating trial and error gameplay, where one mistake ends the game and you need to do the whole mission over again. Luckily there are not many of these, but still I hate defusing bombs. I also would have liked to perform more of those so called normal operations, but now the main focus is to stop this GUILT and not much else.
There´s no multiplayer what so ever, so Trauma Center: Second is just a one surgeon´s affair.
I encourage you to read the manual before starting the game unless you are already familiar with many medical terms in English like “aneurysm”, “carsinoma” and “laceration”.
I recommend this game to you, who hasn´t played the original DS game Trauma Center: Under The Knife. This Wii version is a unique and different gaming experience.