Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii) Review

Picture Courtesy of www.mwii.com.au

Trauma Center: New Blood is the second installment of the Trauma Center franchise done for the Wii. The first one is Trauma Center: Second Opinion. The game, in my opinion, would be classified as a puzzle game. The catch with it though, is it's severely timed. If you don't do the correct steps quick enough, you patient will die. I found myself stumbling on a few of these situations that always seemed to cause me trouble. The storyline is pretty simple. There are two doctors, Dr. Vaughn and Dr. Blaylock. Both are doctors in a little hospital in Alaska. You go from episode to episode doing different procedures, all the while, "cutscenes" (I put it in quotes because they're not really cutscenes) attempt to convey an underlying storyline for both Vaughn and Blaylock. The failure montage is really dark though. When you fail an "episode," it states, "For Dr. Vaughn and Dr. Blaylock, two gifted doctors who strove for perfection, the pain of their mistake was too much to bear. Without a parting word, they both left the field of medicine forever..."



The basic controls are quite simple. It's controlled with the Wii remote and nunchuck. You select your medical instrument with the joystick and use it with the corresponding buttons along with pointing the Wii remote to the screen. The controls are pretty responsive, and accurate. The storyline makes you feel for the doctors, sort of.

The negative aspects though are that it's not very clear on some parts. Granted, you go through tutorials, that are well done I must add, so you should remember how to do things; but every once and a while, you find yourself in a stressful level not remembering how to do something. There is also a special power called the "Healing Touch." I have to say that I never got the hang of it. I didn't pass the tutorial.




I didn't find out until later that there was a co-op mode. This makes all the levels easier because there is no difficulty change between co-op and single player. It just provides an extra set of hands to work with.

Final conclusion of the game: It's a decent puzzle game for the Wii. It takes the motion sensors and actually uses them well. However, I wasn't a huge fan of the game. It's better than Second Opinion, but that's not insanely great. I will say that I had fun (along with feeling some actual tension) on some levels. I left those levels actually, somewhat, feeling like I did save a life. Those levels were difficult, but not enough to where you'd say, "this is impossible" and rage quit. My recommendation would be to rent it.

Rating: Super Knuckles