Games

Medic Training Simulator

Transplanting the fun back into simulator games

There are a ton of simulator games out there. For people who want to try their hand at Farming, driving a bus, or mining a stone quarry there are simulator games out there for you! These games portray all the elements you need to master to be successful in these games, often sacrificing fun in their quest to be 100% accurate. This week, Felix games tried out a simulator game that defies the convention and does the exact opposite of this. Surgeon simulator definitely includes more fun than accuracy and is one of the most hilarious games I’ve ever played.

Surgeon simulator, unlike every other simulator game, has very simple controls. You can orient and move one hand in space with the mouse and move each finger in and out with a different button. The first challenge of the game is to select a mission. You start off in a surgery office and must immediately move your hand around to select a surgery from the clip pad. Everything in the game is interactive and this provides added fun through the often funnily named achievements that pop up. For example you get an achievement for making the rock horns with your hands, or creating a time lord by inserting two hearts into your patient.

The surgeries (transplants) normally take the same steps to complete. First you must remove as much as you possibly can, including the required organ that you are transplanting. Sometimes this is easy; remove the ribs with a hammer, the intestines a hacksaw, etc. Often times it is not as easy as it sounds as you have to carefully cut certain connecting arteries before you are able to rip out the organs and this coupled with the awkward controls makes the game hard. This is where the humour saves the game. Sometimes you are frustrated after “accidently” killing the patient but you are laughing too much to care. The game teaches you that so much can go wrong with surgery, you can drug yourself, electrocute yourself, have a precision cutting laser fly around the room as you forget to put it back in its container but the satisfaction of removing parts of a patient and successfully performing a transplant makes up for this.

Surgeon simulator gives you a rating at the end of each mission which provides replay value and has different modes of surgery. Once you’ve completed the 3 basic surgeries (heart, kidney and brain transplants) you can repeat them again from the back of an ambulance. Ambulance mode is much harder as the driver seems to go very fast over every speed bump they can find sending tools and parts of the patient flying (to be fair this is how I would drive in an ambulance driver simulator game). You can even loose parts out the back of the ambulance which makes you creative as you try to perform the surgery having lost the “correct” tools. Another special mode worth mentioning is the uber heart transplant surgery which sees you as a medic from Team Fortress 2 performing a heart transplant on one of your fallen team mates. This mode however gives you team fortress 2 items such as the engineers wrench to perform the surgery which makes for a very messy time. My patient died in this mode because they were slowly bleeding out after I’d removed the heart and I failed to find the new one.

Overall Surgeon Simulator is an entertaining game that does not take itself too seriously. It looks good visually, provides a unique game experience and offers much for its price of £6.99. It’s a game that can be enjoyed by all. Completionists can look forward to finding all the games secrets and unlocking the games achievements, the hardcore among you can speed run the game or you can just enjoy doing the occasional surgery now and then. Personally I like to play this game with a cup of tea while in my pyjamas which is maybe why I’m not very good at it. This game won’t teach you to be a surgeon but it will provide you with hours of entertainment and is definitely worth picking up.

From Issue 1567

7th Feb 2014

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