Trauma Team Review

Trauma Team's diverse array of specialists make this lengthy doctor's visit fun, engaging, and rewarding.

The Exelence are:

* Great variety of medical activities
* Sharp controls across the board
* Novel forensics and diagnosis mechanics
* Eclectic cast of characters will win you over.

The weakness are:

* Some episodes and cutscenes drag on too long
* Obscure solutions can trip you up.

Wach below Video Review From Machinima


Previous Trauma Center games have focused on virtual surgery, challenging you to hone your operating skills to a scalpel's edge with punishing difficulty. Trauma Team takes a more holistic approach by staffing six different characters, each with a distinct specialty. No two disciplines play the same way, and the resulting variety is refreshing. Still, there is a lot of cleverness to be found in both the gameplay and the writing. Of course, neither is without its flaws, and the game sometimes drags its feet when it should be moving things along. Occasional pacing slowdowns aside, this is a lengthy game that is packed with content and priced affordably.

The most familiar discipline here is surgery. The controls use the same slick system as before: you select your tool with the analog stick and perform actions with the remote. It is definitely entertaining (even for TC veterans), and there are some new elements to contend with, but surgery is nowhere near as challenging as it was in previous games. There are no supernatural abilities to contend with, only the story of an amnesiac prisoner called on to perform high-risk surgeries in exchange for years off of his sentence. Surgery is more streamlined in Trauma Team because it plays a supporting role instead of being the franchise player. While some may lament the reduced challenge, this old standby ends up filling its niche quite nicely because the other disciplines round out the game so well.

Orthopedics is similar to surgery in that it deals mainly with cutting on an anesthetized patient, but it plays out a little differently. Rather than selecting your tool on the fly, you use the one you are automatically given. You cut, drill, hammer, and screw in sequence, all the while building up a chain meter for each successful action. This meter offers another layer of instant feedback on top of the neon adjectives displayed after every action, upping the pressure as the procedure continues and your chain grows bigger. Another significant difference is in how the cutting action is presented. Pointing the remote to keep your tool in the designated area is easy at first, but it's not long before the camera starts moving of its own accord, forcing you to keep up with the cut line while staying within the borders of the guide. Soon, the camera starts moving out of sync with the guide, and you have to be even more wary. This is initially aggravating, but once you get the hang of things, it becomes a reasonable, if slightly contrived, challenge. The orthopedic doctor is a muscular specimen named Hank Freebird, a relentless optimist whose extracurricular activities, while almost too goofy, somehow manage to stay within the bounds of sanity.

Emergency care is the most intense of all the disciplines and is handled by a similarly intense doctor who loves to take charge and yell at people. Controlwise, this mode is similar to surgery, but you have only a few tools at your disposal, and your focus is on stabilizing patients so they can be transported to the hospital. Burns, cuts, and broken limbs are your common foes, but the real challenge is that you have to handle multiple patients at a time, and they are all losing health quickly. Switching between patients and administering treatment is an engagingly hectic challenge, though you can find yourself forced to rely overmuch on the magical health-boosting stabilizer injection. Still, this is the most frantic action in Trauma Team, and successfully saving a bloody parade of accident victims is very satisfying.

Endoscopy is a much more deliberate specialty, but it's not without its challenges. The trick here is the controls: you have to pinch A and B and move the remote forward or backward, mimicking the motion of pushing or pulling the endoscope through your patient's inner pathways. Steering and tool usage are both relegated to the nunchuk, and learning how to use the analog stick to cut after being accustomed to using the remote is definitely tricky. The controls are sharp, but tough to master. This helps mitigate the fact that endoscopy is one of the more repetitive disciplines, because it takes a while before you get the hang of things. Trauma Team's resident endoscopist is Tomoe Tachibana, the daughter of a modern-day samurai lord, who is on a quest to attain honor outside of her homeland and prove her worth