Published on 12:05 AM, October 27, 2013

APP REVIEW

Amateur Surgeon 3: Tag Team Trauma

Amateur Surgeon 3: Tag Team TraumaGrab your chainsaws, staplers, pizza cutters, knives and lighters for Adult Swim's third addition to the Amateur Surgeon series, Amateur Surgeon 3: Tag Team Trauma. In this series, you play the graduate surgeon, Ophelia Payne (yes, she feels your pain) as she works as Dr. Alan Probe's (the previous protagonist of the series) protégé and goes to various places and operates on different kinds of patients with odd conditions using even odder methods.
The game has hilarious dialogue with jokes you see coming from a mile away but are still funny and the gameplay isn't too gory but it still isn't for people who can't handle even a little bit of blood. The first two operations, on a genetically enhanced pug named Mr. Giblets and a test dummy with a “medical condition”, teach you the basics of each tool. After that you're on your own to experiment and figure out how to solve each problem using very unorthodox techniques.
The “Tag Team” in the title refers to the fact that you have partners which you can tag into operations, each with their own special powers, such as karate masters, robots and Mr. Giblets, who has drool that can increase a patient's life force. The game requires you to be as flawless as possible, because every mistake decreases the patient's life force, and there's a set time to do the operations. You lose the level if the patient dies or if you run out of time, and you have three retries -- if you use them, they recharge at the rate of one every half hour or one for every dollar. Your tag team partners require rest after being used in an operation for half an hour; or you could pay to recharge them instantly. So there are choices between operating really slowly or paying and being allowed to go through the game at a reasonable pace.
The game offers a lot of humor and you'd want to play through it all the way until the end, and the challenges are fun and creative, such as people being stabbed with toothbrushes or bats inside someone's ribcage. It's definitely very immersive, but also extremely annoying due to the fact that a lot of things are there for in-app purchases and the game's not too shy to make random ads pop up every now and then either.