Aaaaaall right. Been playing this for a couple days, and I have to say it is pretty great.
As far as in-game graphics go, it still looks pretty friendly to the squeamish. Hemorrhages and blood pools look like strawberry jelly, and many tumors look like rubies, and it makes me smile. However, the cutscene and character art is nothing short of stunning. The characters are diverse and each has a genuine, unforced personality, which is nice.
Surgery is pretty much the same as you'd be familiar with if you've played earlier Trauma Center games before, but there are a few differences. The biggest change is that you no longer have a time limit, and just because you miss here and there, it won't always affect your final rating. The controls for surgery do feel a little different, and this is a bad thing. They feel just a bit more cumbersome than they were in Second Opinion and New Blood. However, this only really applies to stitching once you get used to it-- it's surprisingly hard to do a simple zigzag. Fortunately, the game doesn't seem to care much.
First Response is pretty fast-paced and will keep you on your toes. The procedures are generally much easier, but you have a lot more to take care of. Basically, you are given multiple patients, and your goal is to stabilize them for transportation to the hospital. Each victim is given a triage tag to tell you their status. If one patient is about to die, you can either focus all of your attention on them, or use a ton of stabilizer to keep them from circling the drain on you while you focus on other patients. In many cases, new patients will be added to be stabilized, and they often seem to come in at the worst times. Also, just because one patient dies on you doesn't mean the game is over, which is nice, because those guys seem to like dying on you.
Orthopedics is actually pretty relaxing in that you can take your time throughout the whole thing. There is absolutely no need to rush, and doing so will generally cause you to screw up. Most of it revolves around following lines to cut, which really is not hard at all. The other parts are either timing-based (such as putting screws in plates) or control-based, where you have to do as well as you can to get something as close to a guideline as possible. There are also times where you have to re-assemble broken bones, which are put together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Endoscopy kind of annoys me when it comes to controls, but that's also probably because I tend to rush. Basically you push your way through various parts of the body and stop hemorrhages and excise tumors or treat ulcers, but in some cases, it makes you get a little creative on how you do things.
Diagnosis is probably my favorite new addition to the series. You consult a patient in the examination room, gathering symptoms from what they say, their charts, electrocardiography, auscultation, and simply by examining their body or behavior. Once you gather enough symptoms from the initial examination, you go to your office and piece your diagnosis together using the symptoms you have found. Once you do that, you can order x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, scintigraphies, and so on for further evidence to your diagnosis. However, some patients don't like to cooperate and may sometimes lie or stubbornly refuse exams or tests, which forces you to have to prove to them that they need further examination. Each diagnosis chapter has multiple rounds, where the first few diagnoses may simply be symptoms of something much, much worse. Also, making a bad call causes will count against you, and five mistakes will be game over, so be careful and be sure to save often. Of course, there are no ratings for completing a diagnosis chapter, so feel free to make mistakes if you don't feel like being a perfectionist.
Finally, Forensics. I haven't really delved too deeply into this one yet, so I won't say anything about it for now.
The music is what one could come to expect from the series, and is pretty nice. My only disappointment is that it wasn't done by my favorite composer, Manabu Namiki, who composed the music for Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2.
The story is actually pretty deep and I've found myself getting caught up in the moment, which is actually pretty nice.
That's all I've really got to say so far! I'm pretty pleased with what I've seen at this point.
