Mark:
For some reason, I had to finish this game. All other games were put on hold until I finally rid the world of the GUILT virus. I have no idea why. It wasn’t that this was such a great game, or that the story was so involving that I couldn’t wait to see what was going happen next, but for some reason I just had to beat it. This caused great stress in my life, for you see that towards the end of the game, Trauma Center starts to punish you. It makes you perform these operations at lightening speeds with the imprecise stylus and tiny screen of the DS, and just when you think that it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, it makes you perform it again twice as fast and throws in some glass shards for good measure.
I finally did finish it though, and looking back, I’m glad I did. Like I said, the controls are not very precise, and it seemed to love to wait until you got to the end of an operation to decide that it was going to fail you on gauzing up the wound. Overall, though, this is a very original premise for a game, and I appreciate originality, even if there is the obligatory Japanese honor-quest story attached.
82/100
Russ:
I first tried this one out on the Wii, and quickly decided that its handheld predecessor was more my style. What I liked about this game is that it took fairly straight-forward and simple motions (slashing, dragging, tapping) and made an event out of it. And for being such a simple premise (you’re a surgeon, albeit one with mystical powers), there’s a lot to this game - lots of crazy diseases, patients and locales - and the story is engaging enough to make you want to see it through to the end.
Where Trauma Center suffers is in the monotony of its all-too-repetitive tasks. Near the end of the game, you have to battle the same sets of disease strains at least 3 times over (each set is like 5 diseases, or something) and they get increasingly hard (and sometimes really frustrating). At this point I would have enjoyed a little more story and less action. Seriously, if the writers were running out of surgeries to do, it’s probably time to wrap things up. Pun intended.
76/100
Tyler:
I have small library of DS games that I keep on hand at all times. I really only keep 2 or 3 for playing (Phantom Hourglass and New Super Mario Bros. at the moment) and the rest are primarily for show. See, I like to convert people into gamers. This is a lot harder than it sounds, most people don’t get as fired up for Portal and Bioshock as you or I do. They have misconceptions of what games are and can do. Trauma Center is one of the best titles to get people in to casual gaming. For some reason they like the story; personally I couldn’t play this game if there wasn’t the feature to skip every dialogue/cut-scene/story segment with a click of the start button. The story is common Japanese angsty-kaka. The gameplay, on the other hand, is pretty fun.
I like to slice people open and laser their organs. Always have. The game requires some patience when handling later operations when you have to stop every few moments and get some info from your head nurse. The first time this happens its not a big deal. It actually helps you complete the operation. The 6th or 7th time however, you’ll end up clicking the next icon in a silent boiling rage because you already got the idea an hour ago! Aside from that game design failure and the lame guilt virus story line, this is an addictive and inventive little title.
82/100
Recent Comments