4cr Preview – Trauma Team

Change is good, healthy even. You can’t let yourself get stuck in the same groove forever, and Atlus knows this. After four Trauma Center games, it’s time to change the formula a bit. Trauma Team is still unmistakably a Trauma Center game at its heart, but the six different gameplay modes and more than just a fresh coat of paint. Add in a higher focus on realism (no healing touch here, folks) and a story that shifts around a “living, breathing hospital” and you have something that can legitimately be called a sequel.

Today, Atlus gave us the chance to see two of the gameplay modes – one familiar (first response) and one radically different (diagnostics). Read on for your prescription.

Gabriel Cunningham, the star of the diagnostics mode, is unmistakably the House of the Trauma Team cast. Beyond the obvious – that they’re both Diagnosticians – Cunningham smokes, swaggers, and screams at his patients. He’s a brilliant man with a few secrets in his past (I caught a reference to a child he barely knows during my brief look at the game). Of course, you’ll need to be just as brilliant to complete his levels, which are all about finding the smallest of clues and picking up on patterns in medical tests.

Diagnostics is a first-person adventure mode, and in many ways is Phoenix Wright with a medical theme. There is no time limit, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean that there is no challenge. You are only allowed to make five mistakes, and something as simple as asking the wrong question will count for one of those. After being presented with the patient’s chart, you’ll begin a round of questioning. The patient will discuss how they feel, and like in one of Phoenix Wright’s cross-examinations, you can press any statement that you think might indicate a symptom. As you listen to the patient, you’ll begin registering symptoms in a log that you can feed to your robot companion, RONI. Of course, you can’t just focus on the dialogue. You need to also keep your eyes open for visual cues – things like twitches and groans.

Finish questioning, and you can take a look over a massive list of the patient’s vitals for abnormalities. If their blood pressure is high or some protein count is low, you can note this on the symptom list. This section is where we can really see one of the new focuses for the developer. Trauma Team, while no substitute for medical school, has a ton of optional medical information for those of your that would like to learn a little more about the field. You can click on any of the measurements in the list to learn more about what it is and what levels are considered normal.

After this, the real medical tests begin, things like CT scans, X-rays, and the good old stethoscope. This is where the House part comes in again – you need consent to do any tests, and some patients won’t cooperate. You’ll need to trick or goad them into agreement. In the level we played, we pissed off the patient by making fun of his weight. These tests are all about picking up on little patterns and abnormalities. For the most of the tests, you’ll be given two photos, one of the patient and one that represents a healthy person. You must then point out visual inconsistencies, almost a “Where’s Waldo” type of situation. The stethoscope works in a similar manner, where you click on an area of the patient and listen in. In this case, you have to find abnormal audio patterns, which could potentially get really hard (the demo was of an earlier level, so there was an obvious flutter in the patient’s heart rate).

With all of your tests complete, it’s time to make a diagnosis. The computer will present a list of related diseases from its database, and you’ll have to choose the correct one by matching symptoms. If you notice a familiar symptom while reading through the descriptions, you can select it from your list. This will tick off one of the check-boxes on a diagnosis. This is another area where you’ll have to be careful, because clicking on a symptom that doesn’t match will wipe out one of your allotted mistakes. At the end, you’ll have to pick the disease that has the most check-boxes ticked off. This can still be difficult – we had two diseases where every symptom checked out. However, one of them also had about five more symptoms that we never noticed, so we went with the one that more closely fit (it only had unchecked symptom).

Your work isn’t necessarily done here. Like in an episode of House, your first diagnosis is only a stepping-stone, and new symptoms might appear or your diagnosis might prompt a confession from the patient. Each level of the diagnostics mode will stretch over several rounds of the question-test-diagnose cycle. Unlike your typical 5-10 minute Trauma Center surgery, the diagnostics (and forensics) levels of Trauma Team will take about an hour each. Those two modes alone will make up about fifteen hours of gameplay. There are no difficulty modes for diagnostics (how would you make an adventure game harder?), and no co-op.

We only took a quick look at the first-response mode, but it seems to fall far closer to the standard Trauma Center template. While diagnostics is more of a slow, methodical mode, first-response is based entirely on quick thinking and quicker reflexes. Patients will yell about you about what hurts, and you must keep your eyes open for contextual clues. You’re not doing full-blown surgery, the focus is on patching patients up just enough that they’ll live until they arrive at the hospital. You have to put arms in splits, remove shrapnel, bandage wounds – typical EMT activities – all while avoiding environmental hazards like live wires. You have to most extremely quickly, you will have multiple patients and their vitals are falling fast.

In addition to the multiple gameplay modes, the developers have put a lot of work into crafting an interesting story that shifts around the whole hospital. You’ll see some of the same patients show up in different modes (someone you saved in first-response might come in for surgery later). Although each doctor has their own story, they work in the same hospital. Their stories all intertwine in different ways, and you’ll have to play through all of their modes to see every side of a situation. The cutscenes are fully-animated this time, and there is significantly more voice acting. The end result is that Atlus has crafted a genuinely compelling medical drama (albeit with a significantly Japanese tint).

Trauma Team launches in the US on May 18th. As a huge fan of both Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright, I possibly couldn’t be more excited about the new game, so expect more coverage as we get closer to that release date.

Official Website
Trauma Team Preview (Endoscopy)