Just think, a few years ago, we’d have had absolutely no chance in hell of seeing a surgical operation game appear in the West. The Japanese have been playing sublime little games like this since the dawn of the home consoles, and we’ve been missing out. Better late than never, though ‘ and kudos to Atlus for releasing Trauma Center: Under The Knife to the European audience.
Other companies have tried to get their niche games out to European stores, but with very little success. That’s because although the games are quirky and half decent (Incredible Crisis, Bishi Bashi Special are prime examples), they aren’t anything ’special’. Trauma Center is very special. The game puts you in charge of a young doctor at the outset, and your task is to perform ever more challenging operations on patients in various states of physical health using just your DS stylus. The first operation (and any subsequent operations that require the use of any new techniques) is well documented on the top screen ‘ and given that you have to do things in the exact order required to restore the patient’s vitals, this is very welcome.
The best way of explaining the way the game is played would be to take you through an operation, so that’s what I’ll do. A car crash sees a man laying flatlined in the hospital. He has multiple lacerations across his chest, as well as several nasty pieces of glass that are also lodged in there. These can be removed fairly simply, but your priorities mean that you need to get his heart going first. So, you need to apply some antibiotic gel to his chest with the stylus, before massaging his heart to get it jumping. With this done, you can get to work on that glass and those cuts. The cuts can be sutured with your stylus (just draw the stitches across the wound) and the glass can be removed by disinfecting the area, using the tongs to remove the glass from the wound and placing it in the tray, and using that antibiotic gel again to stem the bleeding. Job done. Until the game throws up a message and some stark drama music to warn you that something else is afoot. He’s flatlining again! A heart massage doesn’t work, so you’ll have to open him up’
Cutting him open with the scalpel involves some slow, steady and confident stylus work, and when you get in there ‘ horror upon horrors ‘ he has internal lacerations and MORE glass lodged internally, but again, his heart is still not beating. Massaging the heart again gains a weak pulse, and the stabilising serum brings him up to a stable 30 beats a minute. So, you get to work on the glass and cuts again, using the same procedure as before. All done again”Oh no…it can’t be!’ says your assisting nurse. A huge cut opens up along the length of the patient’s heart, and the pulsing of the muscle brings a huge stick of glass to the surface. And this is where it gets difficult. If you remove the glass too quickly, you’ll sever more important arteries and things and pretty much kill the patient stone dead ‘ whereas a successful extraction leaves a massive open wound that needs to be stitched perfectly for the patient to stand any chance of recovery. A wound of this size can’t be stitched without thinking, either ‘ you’ll need to be steady, slow and precise. Once this is done, apply more gel to ward off infection and the cleanup process begins, with suturing the operation scar to finish things off being a staple of every operation.
Reading it just isn’t as exciting as playing it, that’s for sure. You need to be sat down with your DS, performing the manoeuvres that will save the patient to even begin to appreciate how good of an idea Trauma Center really is. The implementation isn’t perfect however, since sometimes you’ll make a cut into a patient and find that the game has given you a ‘Bad’ rating for no apparent reason. You’ve followed the line perfectly and not done it too quickly or slowly, but the game has decided that you did it wrong, somehow ‘ and this, of course, affects your final rating for the operation as a whole. It doesn’t happen every time, but is worthy of note. Also of note is that twice during the course of this review, I’d finished with the patient and just needed to sew him back up again, but the game seemed to think that I had more to do. I spent more than a minute just magnifying every area of the open wound to see what I could see, but there was nothing to be found, and the nurse was stuck saying that I had to clear some blood away ‘ but there was no blood to clear! Eventually, you end up losing the game in this situation, since your time limit expires. Again, this only happened twice in dozens upon dozens of operations, but it is again worth mentioning.
Under The Knife will provide a few hours of very solid gameplay, but doesn’t offer anything really other than the main story mode, and a challenge mode where you can replay operations to improve your scores. With that said, I’d much rather have a few hours of top-notch gameplay for my ‘25, than thirty hours of mediocre meandering that’s punctuated by gameplay-extending menial tasks and item collection.
