I picked up the first Trauma Center for the Wii last week and ever since I've been up to my elbows in blood and guts. I've also been playing lots of Trauma Center. (*groans*) I'm really liking being a pretend surgeon so far. It's really an arcade game at heart, demanding skill and speed and rewarding rankings based on your scores. I find being ranked a "Rookie Doctor" for an operation is a real motivation to go back and try again, especially when you've familiarised yourself with the procedure.
Trauma Center may look like a casual game, but there isn't any hand holding here. You'll be told what to do once and expected to remember it for the next operation. We're talking five or six steps here that often need to be executed with speed, multiple times per operation. And just when you think you its going to be all plain sailing the game will throw a sudden crisis at you mid-procedure to really test you. In these types of high pressure scenarios especially, you need the motion controls to work well. Thankfully, for the most part they're accurate and responsive but there is one notable exception.
Up to now, I've had a lot of trouble trying to push the defibrillator towards the screen. Slow movements are needed for the action to register. When you need to concentrate on getting the controls to work rather than on the game, the sense of immersion the motion controls give rapidly vanishes. I hope that Wii Motion Plus can fix problems like this.
The story here kind of surprised me. I'm actually finding pretty interesting in a melodramatic, soapy kind of way. So far there's been a few surprising little twists and turns and it's quite a bit darker in places than I would have expected.
Overall, aside from the disappointing defibrillator, it's been really good so far and well worth the now budget price.
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