"The next evolution of the Trauma Center series."

I’ve always really enjoyed the concept behind the Trauma Center series. Performing surgeries, whether it be with a stylus or a Wii remote (depending on which game), felt fresh and satisfying. Still, I never saw any of the games through to the end until Trauma Team came along.

While previous games attempted to keep things interesting with each surgery, I would inevitably lose interest after extended playing. This is where Trauma Team excels. Rather than have you perform surgery after surgery, Trauma Team‘s missions are divided between six different characters; only one of which is a general surgeon. Thanks to the great sense of variety this provides, I never found myself getting bored.

Until the final portions of the game, you can play as much or as little of each character’s story as you like before switching characters. They are, however, spread across a narrative timeline. Since the doctors’ stories often overlap, I found it most enjoyable to switch characters in the order the timeline wanted me to. Sometimes you’ll work on the same patient with different doctors at different points on the timeline.

The only disadvantage to the free-form order is that it results in a few seemingly redundant tutorials in the earlier missions. Fortunately, many of the tutorials in Trauma Team are just textual pop-ups that can be easily skipped.

Surgery missions are exactly what you’d expect from the series. The Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) is a much more interesting variation of that. While controlling the game’s EMT, you’ll have to keep multiple patients alive. Things are really fast paced and hectic, especially considering additional patients can be brought in at any moment.

Endoscopy is a strange hybrid of surgery and exploration. While moving the endoscope, you have a radar that tells you where affected areas can be found. While intestines will have you moving down a winding tunnel, missions involving more complex areas, such as the bronchi, can become quite maze-like. While feeding the endoscope into the body can occasionally get a bit tiresome, the endoscopy missions are pretty enjoyable overall.

The doctor I found to be the least interesting, both in story and in gameplay, was the Orthopedic Surgeon. Sure, you’ll perform a lot of different actions such as cutting and drilling though bones, hammering in pins, and screwing on metal plates, but it lacks the sense of urgency that the other operations provide.

Strangely, I had the most enjoyment playing as the two non-surgical doctors. The first of these is a diagnostician. The objective is to find as many symptoms as you can, compare them with diseases in a database, and diagnose the patient’s condition. You can find symptoms by questioning the patient and pointing them out in the dialogue, examining them, checking all the numbers in their charts, comparing various scans such as x-rays and MRIs with those of a healthy person, and more. It really put me in the mindset of being a doctor and the result was quite satisfying.

My favorite of the six, though, are the Forensics missions with returning character Naomi Kimishima. These play out somewhat like a point-and-click adventure game. You must gather clues from crime scenes, corpses, and witness testimony. You’ll then analyze clues, combine them, and answer logic questions.

While the voice acting throughout the game is generally good, the voices of Naomi and “Little Guy” (the FBI agent that assists you during investigations) is fantastic. It really brings the two characters to life as they banter back and forth. The cases are also written pretty intelligently with some truly bizarre situations.

Each investigation is considerably longer than any of the operations. Thankfully, you can save and quit at almost any time during them. In spite of their length, I always looked forward to them. I’d be perfectly happy seeing Atlus give Naomi her own investigation spin-off series.

Though it can be a bit melodramatic at times, Trauma Team actually has a very engaging story once it gets going. There are a few odd choices that don’t seem to fit with the rest of the game such as the Orthopedic Surgeon secretly fighting crime in tights and Naomi’s magic cell phone that can hear the victims’ last words (but doesn’t actually contribute to solving cases in any meaningful way). However, these are minor gripes in an otherwise enjoyable medical drama.

Co-op has been revamped since the last game. It isn’t an available feature for every doctor, but each one that has it works differently. One of the most interesting takes on it is in surgery. The surgical tools are divided between the two players. You can give as little or as many tools to the second player as you want at the start of the mission.

Trauma Team manages to make the series jump from good to great. The variety in gameplay keeps you drawn in, the story gets really interesting over the game’s twenty-something hours, and the more “sci-fi” elements of the later operations are much less cheesy than past iterations. If you ever had interest in the Trauma Center series, Trauma Team trumps previous games in practically every regard.

This review is based on a copy of Trauma Team provided to us by Atlus.

Tags: adventure games, Atlus, medical drama, story, Trauma Center, Trauma Team

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.