Trauma Center: Second Opinion - I'm Not A Doctor, I Play One On My Wii

One game I was really looking forward to playing on our Nintendo Wii Game Console was Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Where the kids and others in my family were looking forward to the action games, I was looking forward to some role-playing. Doing surgery seemed like it would be a lot of fun.

The story goes that the player takes on the part of newbie Doctor Derek Stiles. He’s a surgeon who just completed his residency, although not with flying colors. He practices at Hope Hospital where he encounters several other regular characters who move in and out of the game. Action also takes place around the fictional city of Angeles Bay as well as another hospital by the name of St. Francis and Caduceus International, a semi-covert organization that is prominent on the disease-fighting front. This is despite the fact that everything is set in the year 2018 and many diseases we currently consider commonplace have been eradicated.

The player uses a Wii Remote and a Nunchuk to play the game. What the buttons do depends on the instrument. To select an instrument, the knob on the Nunchuk is used to spin a dial on the screen to that instrument. This took some getting used to and I wasted a lot of time just being able to land on the correct instrument to use quite often. The instruction booklet that comes with the game is hit or miss in how it explains how to control the instruments. I found myself getting very frustrated with the lack of explanation several times and almost threw the controllers at one point. It was only through searching online on a few occasions that I found out how to use the controllers to work some of the instruments. The in-game help could definitely be much more detailed and accessible.

How the controllers work took time to get used to as well. Something as simple as stitching up a wound looked totally sloppy when I did it the way that “worked” according to the game. I did find the way the procedures went very helpful in getting used to using the controllers and various medical tools for conditions, so the level of play and the way the difficulty increased seemed good.

As Dr. Stiles, I found myself getting yelled at quite a bit. I swear if I heard “Dr. Stiles!!!” one more time I was about to kill the sound on the game. The way the story is told isn’t fluid and is told with blocks of text telling the story while static pictures flash on the screen. The action could be much more fluid outside of when I’m performing a procedure and it would do a heck of a lot for the game itself.

The characters are also flat in the game too. Most of them are shown in the same pose over and over again. There is an assistant who is supposed to help, but I found the help not to be what I needed most of the time. One time when I got particularly frustrated was the first time I had to use the defribrillator and I couldn’t get the pads onto the patient’s chest. There was no one on the screen telling me how to use it and no way to get help anywhere within the game. The assistant didn’t say anything either and it took coaching from one of the gaming sites that helped me get through this point.

I know a huge complaint with many Wii games is the graphics, and this is the first one that I really felt it was a shortcoming. I think if the game were better overall, the graphics wouldn’t matter as much. The images aren’t particularly gory or graphic and I could easily tell what I was doing in the game. It just wasn’t something that dazzled me in terms of graphics.

The story did keep me coming back, even when I got fed up. Putting it down for a few days and thinking about it always seemed to suck me back in. I like the way the story advanced and grew, and a lot of the situations that frustrated me were solved by walking away for a period of time and thinking about it. The character of Dr. Stiles did seem to grow in his capabilities he more I played him which is a gratifying feeling and I felt like I was accomplishing something.

There is scoring, but I honestly paid little attention to scoring on the operations/procedures. I just wanted to get through each procedure within the time limit and didn’t worry about the score. There are difficulty levels and I did the first play-through on the easiest level and I’m now trying it on “NORMAL”. With the experience I gained in the "EASY" mode, I'm having a much better time with it even at the higher difficulty.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion is a tense game. Trying to watch the patient’s condition as well as figure out how best to finish the procedure and close the patient up while time is ticking down can make anyone flustered. Is it a game I would purchase again if I had the chance? I’m not all that sure. It definitely wasn’t what I expected from the game and I was very disappointed in the graphics.

If the graphics were better, I would definitely recommend the game highly even with the frustrations. Right now, I only recommend this if the whole surgery concept really interests you. I hope the next incarnation of this game for Nintendo Wii is better.


Other Nintendo Wii game reviews:

Wii Play


© 2007 Patti Aliventi