Next-Gen Reviews

Without question one of the most unusual success stories of the last few years, Surgeon Simulator's fleeting status as a PC must-have is entirely attributable to near ceaseless pre-launch YouTube coverage. Obviously, many of those videos are still available to view today, and almost all of them follow a pretty rigid formula. A usually male, usually Scandinavian player grapples with the purposely awful control scheme for fifteen minutes, all the while directing inane instructions and pleas for help to his non-existent sidekick in the digital theatre.

 

At first glance Surgeon Simulator does look extremely appealing, but it is very much the gaming equivalent of a novelty record. Once upon a time a ludicrously poor song called "Mr Blobby" sold 600k records and spent three weeks at number one in the UK singles chart, but today, anybody who attempts to legitimise its status as a serious piece of music needs, pun intended, to have their head examined. And Surgeon Simulator is a somewhat similar case.

What Surgeon Simulator offers is a battle against insurmountable odds, and those insurmountable odds are provided exclusively by a control scheme that's designed to make you fail as amusingly as possible, as often as possible. Simply maintaining your grip on a tool is a gigantic pain in the proverbial neck, everything floats around in amiable near-zero gravity and accidentally dropping an important implement off the side of the operating table - which is very, very easily done - is a recipe for an instant restart, regardless of how far into the procedure you are.

 

The controls - which, as mentioned already, are purposely designed to be appalling - are a combination of motion control (which can be swapped to the right thumbstick if need be) and the DualShock's four shoulder buttons. L2 lowers your hand towards the operating table, R1 clasps your thumb and forefinger together and R2 controls the grip of the rest of your fingers. It is no better and no worse than a mouse and keyboard set-up; no easier to master and no more (or less) totally inefficient.

 

This is a game that has been custom built to be played drunk, with friends, for not very long. This is why its status as a YouTube sensation is so understandable: it's a parade of slapstick jokes that are amusing for all of fifteen minutes or so. After that, those people foolish enough to have paid full whack for the entire thing are stuck battling with its utter, brazen inability to be an even mildly compelling videogame.

 

And it isn't, really. It's a game that does require a great deal of skill to master, but do you really want to spend an inordinate amount of time learning to play a game that's only real purpose is to make you laugh a little bit? If you are, therein lies the key to whether or not you should invest in Surgeon Simulator. But that entire process seems like a contradiction in terms. If you master a game like this, you're spared the humour of it. Which, for most, is the only real thing that it has going for it.

 

This isn't an especially good port either. The frame rate stutters uncontrollably when you do too much in too short a space of time, there's persistent audio clipping and even hard crashes: a first for this reviewer on the Playstation 4. The numerous visual glitches of the PC/Mac version are also present, but then it's obvious that they are supposed to provide some of the charm. Ha ha. This game's rubbish. Do you really need to pay the best part of ten pounds to figure that out? Not really.

 

 

5/10

Review By Chet Roivas