Surgeon Simulator Review
Developer Bossa Studios
Publisher Bossa Studios
Platform PC
Release Date Out Now.
You may have seen one or two of the many hilarious videos of people playing Surgeon Simulator. A game that was conceived and made over a weekend at game jam.
Despite having simulator in the title this is far from a traditional ultra-realistic simulator this is more a test of dexterity in a similar way to QWOP (Another simple yet hilariously difficult game).
To control your surgeon’s hand you use five different keys along with your mouse to control movement and his grip. Q,W,E,R and Space bar are set to each of the fingers on your hand. For example pressing all five will grasp in a fist. Pressing R and Space will clamp your thumb and pointing finger. It takes around 30 seconds before you will be giving your patient rude hand gestures.
The mouse controls your hand’s movement, you can move it forward and back, left and right by just moving your move around in the normal fashion. Clicking the Right button allows you to the bend at the wrist and the left button brings your hand down towards the patient.
It all sounds simple doesn’t it? Well it’s not. The controls are quite unnatural. Trying to just pick up a drill or scalpel is incredibly difficult. Even if you do manage to pick something up it is often at a weird angle or barely held with two fingers. Things will get knocked over, you will drop instruments into the patient and prick yourself with needles that result in hilarious hallucinations.
If you really want a laugh then team up with a friend and let one player control the fingers the other control the mouse. It is ridiculously hilarious.
The game is a lot of fun but it is fairly rough around the edges. It was knocked together in a weekend initially but some extra work has gone into the game since to add more features and tighten it up a bit, but it is still quite rough. You will encounter some strange bugs and “quirky” physics to be nice about it.
You may have seen the heart transplant in many of the videos but there is more to the game. You also have the more complex kidney and brain transplant to try and master. You have a range of tools such as precision lasers, sharp scalpels, rib cutters, and for some reason a range of garden tools such as hammers and hatchets.
Once you have managed to successfully save those patients then you have to do it all again on the move in the back of an ambulance where as you can imagine everything is moving and bouncing and generally messing everything up. It is fine when you drop a scalpel but not so good when you drop a heart!
Odd achievements pop up including one for answering the phone from the menu screen, and pro tip pop the floppy disk into the computer to reveal a clever delight.
Overall: You get what you expect from a game slapped together in a weekend but what it lacks in polish it makes up in fun. It is a hard one to slap a score on we had tins of fun but at the same time I can see people getting frustrated with it after a few minutes.
SCORE 3.5/5
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