Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii) Review
The Trauma Center series really hasn’t had a great run here in Australia. The initial title for Wii, Second Opinion, was released a whole year after everybody else had it (including the UK), while the original DS version was released in limited numbers, four months after its original release. Trauma Center: New Blood continues this tradition with Nintendo Australia launching the game over a year after its original North American release.
So, after such a long delay, does New Blood hold up, or is the series in desperate need of a transfusion? Unlike its predecessor, Trauma Center: New Blood is an entirely original entry in the series designed exclusively for the Nintendo Wii. It takes place roughly seven years after the latest DS version, Under The Knife 2, and sees players taking control of one of two talented doctors, Markus Vaughn or Valerie Blaylock. Both doctors work together at the Montgomery Memorial Hospital in Alaska and, similar to Naomi Weaver and Derek Stiles from the previous games, exhibit the mysterious “healing touch” ability. Fast forward a couple of operations and Markus and Valerie discover a frightening new bio-medical threat and are recruited into Caduceus, the game’s equivalent of the World Health Organisation.
Okay, so the story really doesn’t sound all that different to the previous Trauma Center games and I wouldn’t blame you if you thought it was unoriginal, but believe me when I say New Blood does have its fair share of twists and turns that will keep you guessing. The setting and characters really makes you feel like you are taking part in a medical drama similar to a television series like House or, dare I say it, ER. Heck, even the introduction sequence is very derivative of House, and it’s clear the team took a lot of inspiration from similar shows. The characters are fully voiced and really add to the tension and drama too. The graphics in Trauma Center: New Blood have been improved considerably over Second Opinion. Where Second Opinion was a port of the original DS title, New Blood has been built for the Wii from the ground up and it is obvious a lot more thought and care has gone into its creation. The graphics are crisp and clean, character portraits express emotions really well and moving parts during operations resemble their real life counterparts. It’s not amazingly detailed with particle effects and bump-mapping and all that jazz, but it is a very clean and nice looking game.
All-in-all, Atlus has done a really good job of creating a convincing visual style that takes advantage of the Wii hardware. The gameplay in New Blood is typical of the previous Trauma Center games. The Wii remote is used as a variety of surgical instruments with the nunchuck used to change between the various tools. For example, selecting a pair of forceps is done using the analogue stick on the nunchuck, but the grabbing and manipulation of body tissue is handled by grabbing the object with the A+B buttons and moving it with the Wii remote. The controls work really well and help to make you feel like you are actually performing the operation (well, as close as you can, considering the medium). They also really help you to become invested in your patient’s well-being and make you want to save them. Operations generally require you to meet certain goals within a specified time limit. For example, an operation may require you to remove ten tumors while monitoring the patient’s Vitals. Vitals are the equivalent of an ECG, communicating the patient’s heartbeat to the player. The general idea of operations is that all of the various tasks must be done before the Vitals fall to zero or the time limit runs out. After each operation you are given a grade, and although grades aren’t that important, you can upload them to online leader boards.
Those people familiar with the stylus control of the DS versions may be somewhat put off by the game’s Wii remote control scheme, but it has been “tweaked” a bit since Second Opinion to make it just that little bit more intuitive. This is important for moments when you feel like you should be doing about 20 things at once. In that regard, there are two major things in New Blood that will help you out with operations. The first is the Healing Touch, an ability that both Markus and Valerie possess but use in different capacities. Markus’s Healing Touch slows down the patient’s vitals allowing more actions to be performed, while Valerie’s stabilises the patient’s vitals, allowing players to work without having to worry about the vitals dropping. Both of these powers can be used once per operation by both players, and that brings me to the second component that will help you out during intense operations – your friend.
Trauma Center: New Blood introduces co-operative gameplay to the series for the first time, allowing two people to perform an operation together. In these modes, players can work together to save the patient’s life, which is a really nice touch and works really well – it’s a wonder Atlus never included this in other Trauma Center games. With two players working on the same patient, you’ll find it is very important to communicate with your partner to get things done properly and get things done right. This is an awesome feature, but be aware that you might find yourself yelling at your partner for doing something wrong. Trauma Center: New Blood uses this co-operative gameplay to really make you feel like you are operating on someone with your partner and you might even find yourself getting a little too involved. It’s just a really great and immersive experience. Players who are playing by themselves, however, might find the game a little unbalanced as there is definitely more of an emphasis put on co-op in later operations. However, I prefer to think of it as a challenge rather than being unbalanced.
The audio in Trauma Center: New Blood is pretty good. The pieces that play during operations really help to get the adrenaline flowing and portray the importance of saving someone’s life. The tunes that play during some of the cutscenes portray a solemn and sombre mood, but sometimes they feel like they’re being a little too melodramatic. What is perhaps the biggest asset to the game, though, is that all cutscenes between the operations are fully voiced, meaning a far more immersive experience. The voice acting is extremely high quality and is something that should really be implemented in future titles. Another new addition to Trauma Center: New Blood is the online functionality. Although you can’t play co-operative games online, players can connect to the Nintendo WiFi Connection to upload their grades, scores and times for each operation to global leader boards.
It would have been nice to see some online play, but this is some nice functionality which will definitely keep people coming back to the game again and again. This gives the game a lot of replayability if you’re into that kind of thing, but with the main story mode clocking in at around 10-12 hours, you’ll probably be just as busy with that too. Trauma Center: New Blood is a brilliant Nintendo Wii game and a brilliant game in general. It combines really nice graphics and brilliant voice acting with engaging gameplay and an absolutely amazing co-operative mode to provide a game like no other on the Wii (or any other console for that matter). It is without hesitation that I can recommend Trauma Center: New Blood to almost anyone because it is just one of the most enjoyable experiences that I’ve ever had on the Nintendo Wii. A brilliant game that everyone should give a try, at the very least.
