Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 06/Mar 04:05

Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator – Review

Simulation games are extremely popular right now, and we have reviewed quite a few ourselves. We’ve been mowing digital lawns, running digital fantasy taverns, and we’ve even been cleaning houses in the Alice in Wonderland universe, to name a few. Today, however, we’ve got something more realistic in store compared to the latter, namely Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator. While this title had some interesting ideas, we had to pronounce it dead due to an overdose of bugs, janky gameplay, and a severe lack of polish. Story Even though Ambulance Life lets you choose from pre-made characters with actual bios, the game has no story. You’ll just play through shifts, trying to save as many patients as possible, and that’s pretty much it. In this case, we would have preferred to have a character creator rather than hollow pre-made characters. Graphics Even though Ambulance Life does have a few realistic-looking and detailed assets here and there, it’s not really a good-looking game. Most things look a bit dated and rough around the edges, and for a game that revolves around people, the NPCs have wooden animations and horrendous facial expressions. To make things worse, the overall performance is abysmal. Even with a setup well above the recommended requirements, the game runs poorly. We noticed a lot of slowdowns, texture pop-ins, long loading times, and much more. It’s clear the game isn’t properly optimized, which is a shame. Sound The overall sound design isn’t too bad. The voice acting is decent, albeit a bit emotionless. Sadly, many of the voiced lines are identical to one another, creating a lack of variety in the process. The SFX provide proper audio feedback, but they are also somewhat forgettable and lack variety for certain actions. Gameplay Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is, as the name implies, a simulator in which you play as a paramedic. You’ll have to respond to emergency calls by driving there with your ambulance, make an on-site diagnosis, treat the patient in the ambulance, and ultimately take them to the hospital. It’s interesting on paper, but the execution felt extremely lacking in almost all areas. The game is also a bit overwhelming at the beginning. This is not an issue as you’ll soon find out that there are no real consequences and that you can even ignore certain mechanics and still get a good score for your shift, gaining experience and new cases as a reward. When arriving at a scene, you’ll have to assess the situation and examine the patient. When there are multiple patients on the scene, you’ll have to choose which one you think is the priority, and then you just leave the other victims behind to fend for themselves. For some reason, even for big accidents, you are the only ambulance on the scene. Your assigned partner is also completely useless, as they are limited to shouting random bits of information at you. They cannot help with treatment at all or assist you by driving back to the hospital while you treat the patient in the back of the ambulance. This already made immersion hard, as things simply felt unrealistic. All your items also remain in the ambulance at all times, so you can’t really do anything outside your vehicle except talk to patients and bystanders, to eventually put them on a stretcher. Even though the game tells you a controller will provide you with the best experience when playing the game, we felt the controls were unresponsive and clunky. We noticed some input lag here and there, and even basic navigation was horrendous. For example, we prefer the D-pad to navigate the menu, but for some reason, the game sometimes made the cursor a priority. When treating a patient, the controls were often unresponsive, making it impossible for us to switch our focal point. When ending our shift, we were forced to use the slow-moving cursor, rather than the D-Pad, as for some reason the D-pad makes a selection on the map, which is blurred out at that point and irrelevant. At times, we even had to use our mouse to actually make the game responsive again. The ambulance controls don’t fare any better, as it feels as if you’re not really connected to the surface you’re driving on. Steering feels like a cheap arcade game, and the physics are ridiculous to boot. The latter caused our ambulance to sometimes flip upside down on a straight road with no obstacles, forcing us to reload our previous checkpoint. Due to this, we sometimes had to completely restart the treatment we had already started. The creators must have known that their game wasn’t really that great, as you can turn off pedestrian collision or that you total your vehicle when crashing. Thanks to this, you’ll see a lot fewer game-over screens, as the AI is a bit stupid. You’ll have pedestrians crossing the road, literally running towards your ambulance while the sirens are blaring, or cars that run into you while they were getting out of the way. The so-called safety lane they make for your vehicle is always on the same spot, as the AI doesn’t look from where your ambulance is coming. You might also get stuck in traffic forever, until you nudge cars out of the way, as cars come to a complete halt when you are near (even when your siren is off). Conclusion Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator had a lot of interesting ideas, but the game proved to be a letdown. A lack of polish, performance issues, wonky controls, dated visuals, horrible AI, and a general lack of engaging gameplay quickly turned our excitement into frustration. It’s a shame, really, as this title has a lot of potential. We hope the developers can turn things around with some patches down the line. As it stands now, however, we cannot recommend this one.