Trauma Center (TC) for the Nintendo DS is just one of those rare games that utilize the touch screen in a fun way. Rather than wielding a stylus, you get to imagine yourself into the position of a surgeon wielding a scalpel.

Although the storyline was a bit of a bummer, Trauma Center is a fun experience. It is the closest thing to seeing how your “surgical skills” might have been if you had gone to medical school…without actually going through the suffering. Although it does falter heavily on the realism as the game proceeds and of course is not even close to actual act of doing real surgery, TC is most certainly worth a look for any young budding doctor.

You Are Dr. Derek Stiles

Trauma Center has you play as the main character, Dr. Derek Stiles, a rookie fresh from residency, unskilled and untrained. As the game progresses, you swap some rather boring banter with other doctors, most of who flatter you for your amazing skills or tackily put, “Healing Hands”. As you get better though, a new ominous disease dubbed GUILT arrives, and you being the only surgeon with the ability to operate it, has to figure out how to eradicate this new disease.

The plot is a bit lame in my opinion and the characters all lack a bit of depth. All of them are obsessed with saving patients and put a lot of pressure on you as the main character, in hopes of maybe simulating the real thing. And of course, there are a few clichés here or there about how the patient is most important, and how vital it is to treat them as people…blah blah.

The biggest pet peeve I suppose of the plot is that it really ends up in a totally fantasy realm… Rather than having you perform surgeries that simulate real life angioplasty or a mastectomy, TC starts of with somewhat legitimate operations (such as excising a tumor and inserting a heart valve) but then slowly but surely begins to venture into dangerous territory. The young Dr. Stiles joins a totally flop agency called Caduceus which specializes in treating new emerging diseases, and the game has you fighting strange bizarre creatures in the organs that cause all kinds of ugly multicolored damage by spewing out random blue-purple-yellow clouds…

I think at that point I was disappointed that rather than escalating to more complex procedures the game sets off to just make up strange parasites…and strange conditions and complications during surgery.

Still, even though it takes a huge departure from reality, TC does have a bearable plot which serves as good connective tissue in between the operations. The anime-style characters are nicely drawn, and the game is plentiful with dialogue. Music is nothing special but goes well with the game.

Cut, Laser, Suture, Inject…

The actual gameplay of TC essentially involves operating on the lower touch screen by using the stylus as a kind of all-purpose surgical tool. The top screen tells you information about how much time is left, how many mistakes you can make and any kind of helpful tips the nurse might have on the situation.

Below, the organ is presented, and this is where the fun begins. Although most of the surgical procedures are pretty straightforward, there is a kind of nice natural progression you get into as you begin to become more experienced. You learn for example, to clean an area before cutting, and when closing the incision to suture, clean and bandage. The order of things is important and become almost second nature.

However the limitations of a stylus become quite apparent. Suturing involves just scribbling over the open wound, and suction kind of requires pumping the pen up and down. A few impossible items make their way onto the surgical table, such as a green vial of liquid that has the ability to put the patient’s heart rate back to normal and a mysterious ointment that can cure any small cut by application. The heart rate also drops gradually as the operation proceeds, when in reality it is not nearly that volatile. Still, what are we to say, it’s a game.

Challenge Mode / Diversity of Operations

Near the middle, the game really becomes more like a puzzle game, as some of the scenarios don’t involve so much surgical prowess anymore and instead focus on quick thinking. One of the missions has you defusing a bomb; another has the patient trying to figure out a pattern of disease growth.

Thankfully though with 30+ operations and the chance to replay operations for a higher ranking, there is a fair amount of replay value. I’d estimate about 6-7 hours in total before one gets totally sick of surgery and wants to retire from it all.

Healing Hands, Time Slows Down for Me When I’m Concentrating

My big pet peeve as you can tell is a bit of the game’s liberty on being a bit over the top, and one of the big peeves I had was Dr. Stiles’ strange ability to slow down time after drawing a Star of David over the operating table. This was just a bit too much for me. Granted, it may be that good surgeons do work so smoothly that they can accomplish a lot in less of a time, but a bullet-time Max Payne move from drawing a star was just absurd. The game might as well have asked you to start chanting incantations into the microphone and performing witchcraft…it just seemed to have no place in a surgery game.

Final Score – 7.5 / 10.0

Despite my peeves, I still liked Trauma Center for the make-believe chance of just pretending to be a surgeon. The cutting and the excising are all somewhat the real McCoy, even if this game is just all fantasy in the end. There are plentiful amount of missions and enough dialogue to give it entertainment value. It’s a recommended rent, because I don’t find this one to be a keeper. Basically, it’s a game to beat, show your friends (many of which laughed at me for being a dork after seeing this) and put away never to be seen again. Recommended for its originality and novelty, it’s definitely different from cookie-cutter side-scrollers, Trauma Center, might add a few hours of life into your NDS.




Recommended: Yes