Trauma Center: Under the Knife

Who would have thunk it- the DS has a few games that could literally be considered weird. Other systems, like the PS2, have games like Katamari Damacy. But the DS has quickly established itself to be a weird system, and it tends to pick up weird games.

Now for the king of weird- Trauma Center: Under the Knife. Using and abusing the DS touchpad like addicts abuse drugs, Trauma Center puts you in the shoes of an up-and-coming surgeon and the many, many surgeries he has to preform. That's it. No adventures, nothing really major goes on here except surgery.

Thank god.

To preform surgery, you basically take your DS stylus and operate on the patient with different tools, laid out for you on the sides of the screen. Your knife, your gauze, your antibacterial stuffs, even a hose to suck up blood. Your nurse stays on the top screen and tends to just yell at you and tell you what to do while you cut a guy open and sew him back up again, and pray to god he's better at the end of the day.

If I get one point across in this review, let it be this: THIS GAME IS HARD. For some reason, developer Atlus decided to shove a red hot poker up your ass, game wise. Don't ever expect to be given even the slightest bit of a break in this game. Let me give an example on one of the earlier levels:

Okay, I'm no doctor, but these little aneurisms are appearing in his blood vessels on his spleen. So, the nurse tells me to inject them so they go small, cut them out, put them in a tray, connect the blood vessels together again, and sew em up. Easy? Yeah, one can be done in like 20 seconds. OH NO PROBLEM! There are 10 of them on screen, and if one gets too big, it goes KABOOM and kills the patient. So, where does this leave me? Having to balance out the injections I give to all of those little aneurisms while quickly trying to cut them out and reduce the number I have to watch. By the time I'm done, I'm stressed out, tired, my wrist hurts, and the patient is STILL dead.



Now, everything isn't too bad. The game gives you magic powers, like every other anime lookin game. When you select the "Star" tool and draw a star on the screen, your character "Focus"es and time slows down. This is really nice, except for the part where it only lasts for a little bit. So, your timing and speed have to be inhuman to make sure that if an aneurism in the example above IS going to pop, you put it down before time resumes and it inflates like a latex balloon.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife is still a pretty cool game. The game knows full well you don't want to bulls*** around with a story, so the story is easily ignored for the gameplay (Which is a good thing, it actually kinda sucks). The art style in the game is interesting, but just like other Anime influenced games, could really be taken or left without any pluses or minuses (Well, hold on. Some of the “LET'S DO SURGERY” stances are the stupidest I've ever seen. So yeah, replacing them with something else would have been nice.)

Now for the core stuff in the game. The graphics are pretty good, the 3D for the bodies on the bottom screen is good enough to get the point across, and is definitely better than anything 2D that Atlus could have pulled out of their asses. The sound is decent, but really doesn't do much other than go “DOCTOR!!!” when you're messing up or when your Nurse just wants to whine. I really didn't notice any music, be it because I was too into making sure my patient lived, or just because I thought it was bland. Either way, the core graphics and sound in the game are there and fine, but neither really jumped out at me at being special.



Also note one practical thing: The Nintendo DS stylus does not cut it in this game. If you get this game, you might as well buy yourself a large Palm stylus as well. After even one surgery, your hand will hurt like someone stepped on it. This is partially because I have big hands, but even those with small hands will find the teensy two inch stylus a little hard to wield. My big old Palm Pilot stylus did well in this game, and actually does well in other games. Needless to say, you will need a stylus, as the thumb grip is absolutely useless in this game. Just a reminder, don't blame me for some sort of weird hand injury.

So, should you get this game? This is a definite possibly. If you're willing to put up with multiple losses and some really irritating game play factors, you will probably love this game. However, if you have a short temper or just want a game that blasts you through with little difficulty, this is not your game.

3 star(s) out of 5

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