Trauma Center: Under the Knife - The O.R. Meets Wario Ware For An Instant Classic
Written: Sep 11 '06 (Updated Sep 11 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: -So much variety(one operation is done on a plane), most unique DS game
Cons: -After the 7 hours it takes to beat, it's mostly over.
The Bottom Line: This game is a crazy surgical rush. It may take 7 hours to completely beat the game, but all the practice it takes to actually beat the game isn't counted.
ikaruga4's Full Review: Trauma Center: Under the Knife for DS
Trauma Center: Under the Knife follows a rookie doctor, Greg Stiles, in his quest to become the world’s greatest surgeon. He has instant success as soon as he finds out he has a great gift to concentrate at a much higher level than the average human, and move many times faster. It is known as the “Healing Touch” and it is a legendary skill that only few people in this fictional world have mastered. The game lets you utilize this gift as you control Stiles in the operating room.
You have ten tools at your disposal, including a scalpel, laser, and ultrasound. Each operation starts by making an incision and operating on many different things from pancreatic cancer to removing parasites. It may be unrealistic (patients with three tumors in their pancreas survive), but if we simply had to surture a wound caused by an attempted suicide, this game wouldn’t be as fun. (Stiles does get to save a young girl from committing suicide quite early in the game, too. He also has a Disney-worthy speech about not giving a hoot to what others think of you.)
Trauma Center starts with Doctor Stiles joining a crew of renowned surgeons and nurses, with Stiles performing minor operations (at least, minor in this game) whose difficulty escalates nicely as one’s skill would likely increase. The game doesn’t just totally throw any idea for a story away, and you’re probably thinking ‘I bet you just perform operations into infinity + 1, how boring’, but, it’s actually quite the contrary. Early in the game, you discover that terrorists have unleashed a new disease into the world, called GUILT, which is an airborne disease that grows parasites in one’s body if exposed. Stiles, who by now also has quite the reputation, is transferred to Caduceus, which is supposed to be a branch of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) (but Caduceus is simply the name of the insignia with the snake wrapped around a stick).
There is also an incredible amount of dialogue between operations to build the story. It also teaches you a lot of medical lingo in the process. The conversations are interesting to read, but they do become annoying if you fail an operation, as you have to go through them again in their entriety. One could think of that as a good thing, forcing the player to try harder during the operation so they don’t have to sit through a 3-minute cut-scene. The dialogue isn’t too special, really, as the conversations are full of “We have another strain of GUILT showing up on *insert random street name* street, and it appears to be contagious.” “Ok, so, I have the serum, are you ready, Doctor Stiles?” “*Puts on gloves* Let’s do it!”
Trauma Center is like Wario Ware on the operating table. The operation starts, as I wrote in the second paragraph, with an incision above the body-part of interest. Then the kind nurse on the upper screen tells you what to do, whether it’s “Use the forceps to drag the protein-based membrane over the wound” or “Let’s close the incision”. After a while, you know what to do in each situation by heart (er, brain. It’s a medical game and it’s best I get the body parts right) and the operations flow smoothly. The challenges become very creative as the adventure progresses, especially when the terrorists start targeting the W.H.O. There is a very unique operation in which Doctor Stiles must use the skills included in his “Healing Touch” to diffuse a bomb. Stiles has ten minutes to make sure multiple things in the bomb are not in danger, or it explodes. His partner just happens to be an ex-police officer in a bomb squad and she tells him what to do. Another great operation is on a GUILT patient in a plane, where Stiles must battle the turbulence and the disease.
The graphics in Trauma Center are great, but not to the point where you feel the need to caress your eyeballs. In fact, you don’t even notice the graphics when you first play the game. The bodies are in 3-D, and so are the body parts. They just aren’t anything to write home about, but they aren’t bad in any way. While the “cut-scenes” don’t show any action, just two faces chatting, the game still has an anime feel to it.
A disappointing factor in Trauma Center is the lack of voice samples. All the cut-scenes are full of animated heads spitting typed words at each other. The only voice you’ll ever hear is from the nurse saying random things like “Hurry up”, to comment on a given situation. Other than that, the sound effects and all things related to audio are great. There’re sound effects when a GUILT parasite starts to slash away at the patient’s tissue. Things like that to make it a more realistic environment. There’s also plenty of catchy music to get stuck in your head. Just like graphics, the audio in this game is only noticable when you pay attention to it, so it won’t be the first thing to amaze you.
Not only does the game last a long time, but it seems to get better and better as it goes along. A great deal of frustration is also included along the journey. Either way, the game will certainly never get boring. There is also a challenge mode where you can improve your skills if you’re too frustrated to play the current mission. This game also makes a big step for all games by not even trying to appeal to gamers with graphics and sound. It runs all on its fantastic gameplay and its ability to keep anyone playing for very long periods of time without boring them. In this way, I think it’s an instant DS classic. It’s definitely at the very least a must-play for all gamers, and a must-have for people who stand behind Nintendo and its third party companies who believe in “innovation first”.
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