Category: 
The character creation screen came up and it looked like a scaled down version of the one in CoH. Some people believe that Doctors are a different sort of hero. There were few choices for skin tone. And limited selections for face and hair. You could choose to wear a lab coat or not. There were a few colors of scrubs there too. I had to settle for short pink hair. This was underwhelming after playing so many games that have a variety of character modifications.
Next you use stars to bestow the qualities that you want your doctor to have. I loaded up on intelligence. There was constitution, charm and dexterity also. Your scores on these affect your abilities in the six disciplines such as general surgery, pediatrics, orthopedics, cardiology, toxicology, and neurosurgery. You play as an intern. As soon as you arrive you realize that the game isn’t about healing, it is about the politics and petty squabbles of ten doctors you compete with. They took five minutes to scold the character for being five minutes late. I suppose that the TV show must be like this, and you have to consider the source. It was immediately disappointing after playing the ingenious Zoo Vet by the same developers.
Gameplay:
Gameplay is an oddly put together combination of elements borrowed from The Sims. It is sort of part RPG, part strategy game, and part Sim and does none of it well. It takes place in a two-story emergency room setting. It has a top-down interface. The camera controls are clumsy and unlike any other games. You have to move the mouse to rotate it in the bottom corners of the screen. To zoom you hold down the right mouse button and pull the mouse back and forth. It was even weirder on the laptop with the track pad.
The game consists of treating patients, and keeping scores for your hygiene, energy, and composure up. There are washtubs and showers to raise your hygiene points, using the cafeteria and sleeping on cots raises energy. There is also a gym to use which supposedly helps your composure. You can boost your personality score with socializing with nurses or you can get on the good side of important VIP’s. You have a small inventory system that holds items called “perks”. However the perk and special abilities features might be compared to scrolls and magic spells in a standard hack-and-slash RPG, but this is no medical Baldurs Gate. It’s not even a quack’s Diablo.
You work out of a waiting room to send patients to beds and go treat them. The actual action consists of clicking on them and watching the doctor go through various animations. You’ll have to call security on someone wandering around the ER dressed as the grim reaper. You do a lot of security duty. It might have been fun to chase them with a syringe of sedatives - but no. You chase junkies, psychotics, dogs all around the ER, with the goal being to call security on them. You deal with off the wall patients like a samurai, a clown, a wealthy socialite, a boxer, a guru, sci-fi nerds in costume. This is nothing like the elegant learning experience of Zoo Vet. How could the same company produce both of these?
Treating patient after patient gets monotonous. It emphasizes the stressful side of ER doctors. There are more patients than you can handle, the bosses are continually making directives, the waiting room gets full, and there are timed challenges. The game is exhausting, badly designed and just not fun. It isn’t an RPG, a Sim or an RTS and it fails by trying to be some of each. For RPG gamers you will find that things are limiting. You can’t really develop your character, you don’t get new incentives. Simmers will miss the ability to buy furnishings, move things around, or specialize in their doctors’ careers. There is no strategy beyond juggling patients.
Graphics:
The 3D graphics engine is way back circa DirectX 6. The character models are cartoonish and look like the original Sims. I don’t know why they didn’t use the ample TV footage since they had the license. For example the Buffy games did, and looked fantastic. On the whole it looks underdeveloped. As if this game was begun back when the show had high ratings and then it sat on a back burner for whatever reason, until it recently was finished off in a rush job.
Audio:
It features the voices of Noah Wiley (Dr. Carter), Mekhi Phifer (Dr. Prett) and Sherry Stringfield (Dr. Lewis) although their dialog is brief. There’s very little voice acting except for what is played during cut screens. Occasionally you hear a nurse chatting or Dr. Carter wondering why you are wasting his time. Most of the sounds you hear are ambient hospital noises. The tune from the show’s opening credits is not used.
Simplicity in a game isn’t a bad thing if it is fun - like A Dog’s Life for example and sadly this one isn’t fun. In the world of gaming where TV licenses are usually bad, the hectic frenzy, goofy patients, the romances, the cliques, and the mess of genres makes it hard to classify. It isn’t entertaining, or addictive. Perhaps because they guesstimated that the core target audience are likely to be casual gamers, that they dumbed it down. Way down. And in any form of entertainment it is always a mistake to underestimate your audience. I think that fans of this TV show would have been better served by a game that had medical instruments to use, motion caps from the show, and the ability to customize their characters. Instead the game is goofy, glitchy and foolish. They can’t all be winners. I have to give this one a rating of a poor 4 out of 10.
G-V Replay Factor (Replayability): Poor. I don’t see how anyone could play through it all the way once never mind again.
Girls Point of View (Graphics): Poor. Graphics are lame.
Girl Power (Are girls going to want to play it?): No. There are too many good games out there.
Purse (Value for money): Don’t waste $29.99 US.
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