The folks over at Atlus bring us Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 for the Nintendo DS, which is a great follow up to the original and brings back the love of cutting up patients. You return as young Dr. Derek Stiles 3 years after his first exploits to rid the world of all kinds of ailments and diseases. GUILT, a terrorist disease concocted to destroy humanity, is back and Dr. Stiles and his nurse must stop it no matter what the cost.

Trauma Center does not deviate from the great gameplay of the first game. All the same tools and procedures are back in this installment. You use your stylus to control everything on the touch screen, from injections to control infections, to incisions to remove exploding organs, to stitching up wounds and putting antibiotic gel on them. You have 8 tools to choose from at a time and simply click on the one you want to use and then perform the correct stylus stroke to operate on your patient. To perform an incision, simply stroke along the incision line and to perform a suture, make a zigzag motion across the wound. The stylus controls are phenomenal and the prompts from the nurse make the game very exciting.

The top screen on your DS shows your score, the time it is taking to perform the procedure, a picture of your nurse and her reactions, and also the chain or combo you have put together. On the bottom screen is where all the action takes place. You can see your patient’s vital stats to make sure they aren’t dying on you as well as a physical representation of the organ or area you are working on. For the most part the graphics are cartoonish, which I think works very well. I doubt anyone would want to operate on a real kidney or spleen. Once you finish an operation you will receive a rank based on how quickly and efficiently you treated your patient.

Here is a great video of what you can expect from playing Trauma Center.

One major difference between this follow up and the original is the ability to choose your level of difficulty now instead of having one game that got progressively harder as you went on like in the first one. You can now choose from Easy, Normal or Hard and play through. When you complete the game you do unlock some extremely difficult operations so in total you have well over 30 different procedures to perform and some decent replay value in perfecting your rank.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 is a very addictive, fast paced puzzle/medical/sim game that will have you wanting to read medical journals in no time. If you own a DS, go grab a copy, especially if you missed the first one. Trauma Center is like playing Operation without the annoying buzzer.

Overall: 8 out of 10

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