So it’s not every day that you get an opportunity to cut people open and fiddle around with their insides in a video game. The few that have tried have generally gotten roundly castigated by various parents’ groups and the media seeking to curry favor with same. But you’ll get your chance—and not be considered some kind of creepy loser—with surgical simulator Trauma Center: New Blood for the Wii.
Seven years after Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2, we join two surgeons, Marcus Vaughn and Valerie Blaylock, working at an out of the way hospital in Alaska, not far from Fairbanks. They’re not exactly happy with this exile, but they make the best of it, such as it is. Working in such a remote setting gives them plenty of challenges to overcome, including cancer and gunshot wounds. But when the hospital in Alaska closes down and Marcus and Valerie return to Concordia Medical Center, they’re plunged into a web of medical intrigue and downright malpractice as they discover the truth behind a host of bizarre conditions, including the Stigma parasite.
I had a lot of fun playing this game, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. I’m giving this a good review but it’s very much a warts and all sort of thing. It has a LOT of problems, even though I had fun with it.
There’s a lot to do here, whether you’re cutting or draining or laser-blasting sores or injecting medication or anything else. And you’ll do it in a rapid fashion, switching on the fly with all your medical tools via the Wii Nunchuk. Everything’s nicely laid out, and I’m almost convinced that this is about what it looks like when you try and remove shards of glass from a human lung. Better, there’s some nice voice acting here, featuring a legion of voice actors that you’ve no doubt heard before, including mainstays like Yuri Lowenthal and anime voice actress extraordinaire Wendee Lee, whom you’ll recognize as Faye from Cowboy Bebop, Haruhi from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Konata from Lucky Star.
But despite the fun, and the sweet voice acting, there are a lot of problems with this game. One, I hate the “healing touch” dynamic. You know what? All I could think was, this is a fairly decent medical simulator until they drug out the VOODOO. Because when I’m excising a benign tumor with a scalpel and disinfecting the site, the last thing I expect to do, or WANT to do, is be able to STOP TIME by DRAWING A PENTAGRAM OVER THE PATIENT. Yeah, boy, that’s some realism right there! Why isn’t every doctor using their magical powers to stop time during surgery? I guess in the real world, such things would cut down on billable hours.
And that’s not where the outrageous flights of fancy end, either—Trauma Center: New Blood details a procedure for essentially curing cancer by use of a scalpel, a drain, and a forceps. And their “antibiotic gel” gets used so often in the course of this game that they should be spawning new superdiseases on an hourly basis. Seriously, they’re spraying the stuff around like it’s room deodorizer at the National Chili Cookoff. And then there’s the gameplay—one challenge level left me trying to operate on three patients in five minutes. I was pulling glass out of a guy’s lung—and suddenly, when I had finished suturing the wounds, NEW GLASS SPROUTED FROM THE LUNG. Like it was growing there!
But still, Trauma Center: New Blood will offer a lot of fun, even if it’s not all it could have been. I do recommend it, but it’s probably a much better rental than a buy.
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