When I first heard about Amateur Surgeon's "R" rating in App Store, I knew this was one application I had to try. Apple, with its heavyweight track record of rejecting applications for bad taste, entered new grounds with this game, which is rated 17+ for mature themes, horror, profanity, crude humor, violence, and drug use. In other words, all the things I find hilarious and engaging. Developed by Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, Amateur Surgeon puts your "wildest surgery fantasies in the palm of your unwashed, unqualified hand." It's clearly aimed at the South Park demographic with low, crude humor. My people.
I anted up my five bucks, downloaded a copy, and sat down to play the game. Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed. On the Trey Parker/Matt Stone scale of entertainment, this barely rated a single Mr. Hankey. Amateur Surgeon was tedious to operate, with little reward beyond the cute little video clips that interspersed segments.
Before I go any further, let me make clear that one's enjoyment of any game is going to be a subjective experience. Amateur Surgeon is no exception to that rule. But the actual surgery work, where you have to cut, staple, cauterize, and anesthetize your patients with common office equipment and spare Bic lighters just wasn't fun to play.
Take the slicing, for example. It took me a good dozen times to actually open up my patient because whoever designed this game didn't take into account that users were using fingers to interact instead of mouse-based pointers. There's a dotted line to follow, but it was a real pain to do so. The size and physical reality of the human finger made it impossible to see exactly where to touch along this helpfully dotted instruction line and, instead of giggling about fun! blood! surgery!, I was sighing in frustration about bad! interface! design!.
Some of the puzzles weren't even particularly surgery-based. There was a rib puzzle that involved moving broken rib fragments back into the chest cavity into their right places. The puzzle was clearly designed for a much larger screen. The whole process of selecting a bone fragment, deselecting the rib mode, zooming in, reselecting rib mode, moving the fragment to try to match it to broken ends, and then having to repeat—especially if you needed to re-align the screen—proved tedious in the extreme.
It seems to me that a game that centers around mowing down innocent civilians and then patching them up should be a lot more fun than Amateur Surgeon actually is. Its snarky attitude and graphics are let down by poorly designed game play and a disappointing match to the touch-based platform.
Name: Amateur Surgeon (iTunes Link)
Publisher:
Price: $4.99
Platform: iPhone and iPod touch
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