One newly excavated ribcage to go please, hold the glass shards and nails.
Imagine that you're living on the tough streets of the big city, just trying to liberate someone from their hard-earned cash when you accidentally "fall on some bullets." A visit to a regular hospital is out of the question. That's where an amateur surgeon comes in.
You play a pizza boy with a penchant for surgery in the first 17+ rated game to appear in the App Store--mostly for violence and profanity and a lot of references to drugs and drinking. It's also the first game from Adult Swim, a more complete version of the short, web-based freebie.
The game starts as you accidentally run over a hobo who turns out to be a disgraced doctor. He urges you to slice him open with your pizza cutter and do a little tinkering, and before you know it, you're on-call for drunks, vagrants, lowlifes, and people who generally aren't seen in the surgical ward.
You'll be using your faithful pizza-cutter as a scalpel, your stapler to make stitches, your cigarette lighter to cauterize wounds, along with plenty of other makeshift medical tools. You'll find out how to use these through trial and error, although there is a rudimentary help screen to give you a few tips. With the pizza-cutter, you'll trace your finger along a dotted line to make an incision, with the tongs you'll gently tug out foreign items by slowly dragging your finger across the screen.
However, sometimes the game doesn't clearly explain how to use complicated items. For instance, you're supposed to use a corkscrew by gesturing in a circle... but it seems to rarely work. Your patient's screams will let you know you're doing something wrong, but you'll have to point and drag until you find the correct way to advance.
The first few medical tasks include removing bullets, broken glass, and porcupine quills from internal organs with your tongs, but soon you'll be delving deeper into someone's innards with a chainsaw in an effort to discover what's wrong. With 30 different patients to operate on, it provides plenty of gameplay and gets more challenging with each new surgery.
The dialogue is funny, and things like using an Etch-a-Sketch as an x-ray make DIY surgery fun. You'll find yourself eager to get the next victim, er... patient on the table as quickly as possible.
Amateur Surgeon full of the Adult Swim brand of adult humor. It's a rare entertainment release; comedy and gameplay are equally good.
Amateur Surgeon 1.0
COMPANY: Adult Swim
CONTACT: www.adultswim.com
PRICE: $4.99
REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod Touch with 2.0 software update.
Extremely funny. Easy to play. Wide variety of surgeries and tools.
Certain procedures aren't clearly explained, causing frustration.
