Publisher: Legacy Interactive
Genre: Medical Game
Price: $19.99
Acquired: Provided by publisher
Verdict: if you’re interested in ER related games, this may work for you.
Pros: Entertaining
Cons: Frustrating controls
Legacy Interactive has a history of Emergency Room games to their credit, including Code Red and 911 Paramedic. Not having played these games, I am at the mercy of other reviews I’ve read about them. I can, however, give you my 2 cents on their latest addition to the series, Real Life Rescues.
Real Life Rescues does a good job of instilling a sense of respect about a very important profession. The issue here is not whether EMTs are important, but whether they make good video game subjects. The picture on the cover of the game gave me the impression that the game would answer with a resounding yes. Unfortunately, life is full of surprises, some good and some not so good. Either way, I will let you be the judge. Just because I wasn’t blown away, doesn’t mean you won’t be. Submitted for your consideration: storyline, the look and sound of the game, and the feel of controls/game play.
So the storyline is actually fairly entertaining. You start as a new hire trainee, and your partner goes thru a few practice procedures with you on a dummy to help you get the feel of the awkward controls and the tiny icons you’ll be using. After training is done, you go on a few calls and then return to the hospital. There, you’ll meet a few of the hospital employees – including, of course, the suits (who are secretly trying to sell out to prevent the hospital from going under). Calls are inevitable and generally happen while you’re gossiping with your partner about the politics of the hospital. There are choices to be made about which call you go on first and while you finish all of them, some are easier or shorter than others. There are 30 calls total and all the skills you learn culminate in the final call which is *gasp* one of the hospital employees. The entire game took me a few hours to finish; nothing too difficult, but it did hold my attention well.
The graphics in the game are the worst thing about it, with the sound as a close second. I felt like I was playing the original Gameboy, and not in a good, I-love-retro way. They are very 2 dimensional in look and not quite 8-bit, but compared to other games I’ve played on the DS, they may as well be. Characters slide off and on the screen when they talk, making some of the conversation a little strange to follow. It was reminiscent of the old TMNT arcade game, right after you put your quarters in and they start going over the storyline. Yeah. It was that ‘good.’ On call, they could have used different pictures or groupings for some of the tools used as well. It just wasn’t as intuitive as I would have liked. There were two songs that played throughout the entire game. One for when you were on call, when for when you weren’t. Neither of them are very enticing; both of them started to sound like nails on a chalkboard after the first 5 or so calls. The only time there was any much-needed variation was when someone went into cardiac arrest. This is great for telling you that you need to drop what you’re doing, but it also did a good job of pissing me off and making me want to just let the person keel over. How dare they play that horrible midi music at me!
I said that controls weren’t exactly intuitive. It’s more because of the groupings though. You are told at the beginning that no matter what is happening with the patient, you always do three specific things first. Then, there are other things that you’ll end up doing with pretty much every torn up patient. They say the controls or tools are grouped according to type, but I found I wanted them grouped according to amount of use. I kept tapping the wrong tab to grab what I needed and it drove me nuts. My only other complaint about the controls is the bandages. Every time I tried to put a bandage on I was faced with opposition. They have become my nemesis. I loathe them, what they stand for, and have begun to avoid them in real life. The game says all you have to do is grab the bandage and drag diagonally from on corner of the wound to the other and let go. Not so. Very rarely did the bandage catch the wound and stick. And after a while, people started dying of blood loss because the game wouldn’t read the bandage I was trying to put on. It actually got so bad that I had to walk away from the game for a while to cool down. I was definitely seeing red, and I’m not talking about the blood loss.
Game play is generally easy; the game is very easy to understand and not challenging at all. You can choose to go back to each stage and play it individually to get a better grade (yes, you get grades even after you’ve become anadvanced EMT), or you can play the storyline. At anytime, you can go back and review the controls if need be as well.
Overall, I liked the game. I played it all the way through and found it entertaining enough to hold even my attention (I’m a bi… Ooh Shiny). If the controls drive you nuts, just walk away for a while, it’ll be better when you come back. However, as the game play doesn’t vary, it may not be a game you expect a lot from. My advice is that you rent or borrow it if you’re interested, beat the game, then give it back. There are likely to be other ER or EMT games that will serve you better than this.
Popularity: unranked [?]
