By
Sean Booker
July 8, 2009 - 18:30
PAL version – also known as Lifesigns: Surgical Unit in North America
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The visual presentation of LifeSigns is quite nice. Everything is hand drawn to showcase a manga-like feel to game. Along with this, the game includes an easy to use interface and basic map layout. Along with a fun look to the characters, the game becomes quite inviting and fun to watch, as you read your way through the adventure and medical stories.
The majority of the game play involves you going through conversations with your fellow colleagues and patients. This ends up becoming a double edged sword as around 70% of the game is reading. You really have to enjoy story driven games in order to get enjoyment from LifeSigns. The most unfortunate part of this is that the game can become quite boring, as you have to spend hours at a time reading dialogue and then selecting the next place to go to read more dialogue. However, for the majority of the time, the conversations themselves are either interesting, intense, or quite funny. The game also goes out of the way to put in conversations that relate to nothing and are only there to give the player a laugh.
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The sound and music in LifeSigns isn’t anything exceptional, but they do the job. During the intense conversations or surgeries you’re faced with high speed music while the depressing and low-key moments are presented with soft melodies. Though, during any conversation, you will have to present the person with the correct documents or objects in order to continue through, and when you present something correctly, you hear a “ding” sound. I quite liked this because it told me when I was proceeding correctly in the story, because when I didn’t, I got a muffled buzzing noise. This was great in order to verify that I was on track and doing things properly.
The rest of the game is centered around examining and performing operations on your sick and injured patients. During the examination you are to use either the Listen, Feel or Visual Inspection commands to find out what is wrong with the person. This sounds good on paper but ends up becoming quite the hassle and can take far longer than it should. The problem with these sections is that you have no hints on where to look on the patient. There will be times when they have a physical bruise and you may know that you need to visually inspect that region, but when it comes to internal issues,
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During the surgical operation parts you must perform a specific surgery in a set amount of time. Not only are you working against the clock during these sections, but you have to make sure to perform all your tasks well enough to not kill the patient. To ensure you are aware of your patients status, you are shown a meter and are notified of their heart rate. If it hits zero, or if you run out of time, you will fail.
Throughout these surgical sections, you will need to perform a sequence of tasks in order to save your patients’ lives. These can range from simple stitching all the way to removing a blood clot in the brain. The majority of these operations can come off as a bit stressful but considering each task usually only requires a slow swipe of your stylus across the screen, it evens itself out. With this, each procedure becomes quite fun and you’ll notice yourself just rushing through that countdown. What started out as a 30 minute operation will end up as quite short when you finally realize that you're done. These surgical procedures are the best part of LifeSigns, as they can be incredibly stressful but very fun.
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The worst part of this is that the surgeries can be quite hard and stressful. Some of the tools you use during the operations require specific actions and, after a while of text, you end up forgetting how to perform that part of the procedure. There were times when I almost lost because, instead of using my tools correctly, I had to guess and check my way through the procedure. It would have been much better if the operations came more frequently, or I was I told more often how to go about them.
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Overall LifeSigns: Hospital Affairs comes up a bit short in entertainment value. It presents itself nicely and is set up well enough to warrant a play through. However, it is still hard to recommend it, considering all the other hospital based point and click adventure games out there. The awkward pacing caused me to feel either incredibly bored or overwhelmed when it came to the surgeries. If you really enjoy text heavy games, you will definitely find some enjoyment here. It has great story telling and makes sure to explore each of the presented characters. LifeSigns ends up feeling a bit weighed down with all the extra elements, instead of sticking to what it should have had most – surgeries and medical operations.
Overall: 6/10
Verdict: Forget It
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