Friday 15 Sep 2006

It’s time to slip into your scrubs, don your face mask and snap on your latex gloves because things might get a little messy when you approach your patients with your arsenal of scalpels, lasers and injections. You’ve always thought you would make a good surgeon, maybe you also enjoyed playing doctor doctor as a kid? Well nothing before has brought you this close to the O.R.

GUILT and the healing touch

It’s the year 2018 and guess what, terrorism still hasn’t been eradicated. In fact terrorists have found new ways to get their messages across.

You enter the game as a young surgeon, Derek Stiles (who we have given the fitting name to of Dr. Stylus), who has just completed his residency and is now about to start working in a full-time position. Soon it will be discovered that you are one of very few doctors that have the “healing touch” technique, which is basically a skill that enables you to go into bullet time whilst performing operations. News soon spreads throughout the hospitals in Angeles Bay of the newbie on the scene with this unique talent and you quickly get headhunted by a research facility named Caduceus.

Soon you will discover that GUILT (Gangliated Utrophin Immuno Latency Toxin) has been released into the country as a biological weapon by a group of medical terrorists. The story might seem a little farfetched at first but in fact it is possible given the rate at which terrorism is growing in the world in which we live today.

Let me brief you…

The game has a really great story, but with it also comes epic sections of storyline conversations where you will find yourself sitting for up to 10 minutes clicking through sentence after sentence of story boards. Ok, this does give the game a good backbone on which to base the progression in difficulty of the operations, but some people may find it puts them off.

At the beginning of each operation you will be given a briefing of the patient and what needs to be done in order to save them. You then dig in by slicing open the patient and sorting out what needs doing. This is pretty straight forward and you will start to notice the formulae of being told to go in and do something, then whilst inside the patient the same problem occurs but in three places and it’s a mad rush against time to eradicate all symptoms and cure the patient. Be sure to have steady hands though because with every missed cut or injection you will inflict damage on the patient lowering their pulse rate (essentially the health bar).

It is for this reason that this game is incredibly difficult, I would go as far as to say it is the most difficult game I have played for the Nintendo DS. You have to be so precise and at the same time do all the things that are required in such a short period of time. I suppose this is actually simulating what it would be like to be a real doctor, having to work under pressure while keeping your calm and making no mistakes.

Great graphics and game play

The graphics are really well done. All the internal organs are done in 3D and the different problems that you will need to cure are clearly identifiable from one another so you will never have to worry about injecting the wrong vaccine into the wrong place. The characters are clearly Japanese in design but are portrayed as American in the game.

The operations vary from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, where your endurance as well as your patience will be tested. I have been so close to throwing my DS against the wall after getting to the last couple of steps in one of these epic surgeries and then missing a cut and losing the patient! Knowing that I would have to start right from the beginning of the operation is enough to make me close my DS or put another game in. Like I said before, this game gets really hard, really quickly.

On the whole Trauma Center – Under the Knife is definitely a title worth picking up as it will keep you entertained for a long, long time, although it will always have the tendency to be the type of game that you will want to put away and then come back to at a later stage to try and get past a difficult operation. The use of the stylus is really great and a perfect mechanism for this type of game. You might find yourself pretending that your DS stylus really is a scalpel and start chasing your friends around the house threatening to operate on them claiming that you’ve had surgical experience… in Trauma Center.

Pros: Great use of the touch screen; lots of game play.
Cons: Lengthy drawn out storylines; pin point accuracy needed most of the time.

Final thought: This game will test you both mentally and physically. It is really challenging and will last a long time. You will probably find yourself playing this game again in about a years time after finishing it as it will always have a replayability factor.

Rating:
Contributor:	Justin

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