Trauma Center: New Blood
December 7,2007 - The first Trauma Center game on the Wii helped launched the system as one of the few good games on the Wii early on. Critically, Second Opinion was a very fun game that had a few flaws that could be taken care of in a sequel. That’s where Trauma Center: New Blood comes into play with improvements that look to put the game up on the upper echelon of great third-party games. Does New Blood find the cure that the series needs or is it still searching?

New Blood takes place ten years after the events in Second Opinion and stars a pair of doctors working at Montgomery Memorial hospital in Alaska. It’s not the best hospital in the best area around, so Markus Vaughn and Valerie Blaylock can get some strange patients in their OR. Soon to be retired, the two doctors move on when it’s closed to Concordia, a hospital in Washington, DC, where they learn of a potential new threat to the world, Stigma. Like the GUILT outbreak ten years earlier, Stigma provides a much greater threat should it get out and it seems like Markus and Valerie are the only two that can stop it. The major flaw to the story is that you’re hit in the face with so many cutscenes leading into and following each operation that you wish you had animated cutscenes to cut down on the fluff and not waste time manually advancing through the meaty story.

Luckily, New Blood doesn’t let Stigma takeover the game’s operation, as the lack of variety in Second Opinion is a thing of the past. From bear attacks and hunting accidents to reality shows and Stigma, none of these operations really feel alike, so there’s no fear of the interesting operations being turned off as the Stigma threat grows. The major problem that plagues the game now is difficulty, as instead of a gradual curve from the first operation to the last, the game features several high peaks and low valleys in that curve that leave you frustrated at times and breezing through the mission that follows. It’s not just that these operations are difficult to get through, but that the margin of error is so small that just making one mistake can make success impossible. It’s expected to make New Blood a bit tougher than Second Opinion, but it seems like some unnecessary steps were taken to do that. Having to dip into the easy mode just to pass these operations doesn’t significantly change anything but the margin of error you’re allowed to have. Also, the guilt trip the game lays on you when your patient dies makes you wish you could just get over it and move on.

The other major flaw of Second Opinion was that you couldn’t work with a fellow doctor on your operations, which New Blood fixes quite well. Now you can have a second pair of hands help you out, which works well. You even take turns on some of the special tools, like the defibrillator or when you need to use your hands to get the heart working again, which keeps the bickering to a minimum. As for additions to the operations and tools themselves, the variety keeps things fresh though the toolset you have hasn’t changed much at all. A few tools have gotten some new uses, like the scanner can now move around the insides when you hold the B button and there are new medications to inject with the syringe. With the two new doctors, the Healing Touch has a slightly different effect between the two, as Markus can slow down time while Valerie prevents the vitals from dropping for a certain amount of time. Another addition are the new leaderboards, which let you upload your scores to see how good you’ve done compared to other players. The main issue is that you have to upload them after you’ve finished an operation or you have to bear the long wait times between loading scores that the game forces upon you. Everything else is pretty much the same as it was in Second Opinion, so veteran doctors can just jump in more easily.

Visually, New Blood changes little from Second Opinion. The main change is that the game can be displayed in 16:9 mode, with little else really changing much at all. The cutscenes are the same cardboard cutout-style animated scenes with text, which with the long introductory story elements, makes you want to skip through to the operation and forget why you’re doing it.

The big addition in the audio department is the voice-acted cutscenes, which add a nice touch to them, but without an auto-advancing feature, you’re most likely going to finish reading each sentence before the actors can finish it. It can get the most annoying during operations when people are telling you what to do long after you’ve figured it out. Luckily, you can have the game fast forward these comments so you can move quickly, but having it turn on the second time you play that operation would be nice.

When it comes down to it, Trauma Center: New Blood fixes the few flaws of Second Opinion while creating a few of its own that hurt the game more than it helps. The game just frustrates more than it entertains at times, though fans of the first game will probably be able to endure it more than new players. A purchase is probably not the best way to play the game, but a rental should satisfy most gamers.

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