A Paramedic Simulator – PS5 Review – PlayStation Country

From Munich-based developer Aesir Interactive, comes the next in the loosely connected simulator games by publisher Nacon , the last being Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator. In this case, it’s Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator. So ferrying people around in rather more urgent circumstances. Only rather than in a facsimile of Barcelona, you’re in the fictional US city of San Pelicano, California.

We hoped that it shared an implementation of the same driving system as Taxi Life, sadly our hopes went out the window pretty rapidly.  Let’s just say that it is idiosyncratic at best. The slightest incline, your ambulance slows to a crawl. It makes the long wheelbase Transit we hired to move house recently seem like an F1 car in comparison. That’s not to mention the alarming rate at which it gathers speed on downhills. With the San Francisco style hills, you’ll be catching mad air in the process. Not ideal with a patient onboard.

So the driving aspect being a bit erratic, things improve when you interact with patients right? Well, they were a bit janky with the pre-release code we started to play before writing our review, but they were serviceable enough. At the outset, you’ll get a 911 call to attend a site. Upon driving there via the GPS routing in your ambulance, you’ll have to assess the patient by visually inspecting them and performing anamnesis. That being talking to them if they’re responsive and seeing what information you can gather.

Unfortunately, the patients tend to have a rather limited set of stock phrases so other than confirming what you’ve probably already concluded, all this really serves to do is to give you the opportunity to reassure the patient they’re going to be OK. Although when a patient is bleeding out, it feels a bit Mr White telling Mr Orange that he’s going to be OK in Reservoir Dogs levels of futility.

At this point, you can use the diagnostic tool to confirm what treatment to take. First you choose an ailment category, followed by the interim diagnosis. This then tells you what treatment to use. At least in theory. You’re then scored on the accuracy of your diagnosis and how you carry out the treatment. Prior to the day one patch, this actually worked a treat. However, things went rapidly south with what were a few annoying glitches being a broken system in the wake of the patch.

Thankfully we’d learned what to actually do with a lot of the cases prior to the patch, so we stood a fighting chance of progressing. Once the diagnosis phase was done, you’re required to get the patient onto a stretcher and then into the ambulance to treat them before scooting off to the hospital. At this point, you’ll begin to realise that the shorter your trip from your ambulance to the casualty, the better.

Not just from a point of practicality, also due to the horribly twitchy movement in this mode. And the tendency to glitch out altogether. Thankfully you can disengage from the stretcher and have another go, but then another problem might arise. You see, when you drop off a patient into the ambulance, you’re supposed to enter via the side door and treat them. Only sometimes the game won’t let you do this at all so you have to take the loss and simply drive them to hospital instead. We had to do this post-patch, expecting a bad rating but somehow it gave us an S rating for that casualty. All very odd.

When it comes to the treatment aspect, you’re generally encouraged to monitor vitals with a oxygen meter and a blood pressure cuff. Though somewhat annoyingly, if you’ve inadvertently put a cuff on an arm that has an injury, the game mechanics won’t let you remove it and treat there, simply blocking you from doing anything further on that section.

Then you can administer remedial treatment, be it bandages for burns or lacerations, any number of injections or clearing airways. Even before the patch hit, the diagnosis aspect was a bit frustrating in terms of it suggesting a particular treatment you didn’t have available yet. Though we’re not sure whether this was by deliberate design or another to add to the litany of bugs. It’s an annoyance at any rate. Another is the recommendation to carry out a tracheostomy, yet despite your medical manual describing it, you don’t seem to be able to carry it out in the ambo anyway.

Then, somewhat daftly you have to exit the ambulance to walk around to the cab and get in the driver’s side door. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were in a right-hand drive vehicle like a civilised country, but naturally it’s left-hand drive. There’s literally a little door between the back of the ambulance and the cab, why can’t you go through there?

After this, you have to take them to hospital and get a short cutscene where your patient is handed over to accident and emergency staff. It’s at this point that all manner of physics glitches make themselves known, usually the blood pressure cuff model glitching out. Then you get scored for the callout, and depending on the shift length you’ve selected, either end your shift or go back to your ambulance and await the next call.

As well as normal shifts, you’ll unlock catastrophic events that are a major emergency. Initially you get ten minutes to triage patients, marking them down with a green tag for walking wounded, yellow for moderate, red for high priority and black for a corpse to be bagged and tagged. Then when the ten minutes have elapsed, you’ll go to a field hospital onsite to treat casualties. Utilising the same mechanics as you would in the ambulance, you only get to take the one casualty with you, as opposed to there being a fleet of ambulances. It seems a bit odd that you’re the only ambulance operating in the entire metropolitan area too. All the while, your partner is mithering you to get to the hospital quickly, despite the fact you have five casualties to treat rather than just one as normal. It’s like being micromanaged by an over-keen boss. We suspect, another problem that was overlooked during development.

Another glitch often happens when you get in your ambulance and start driving. Your second paramedic is left behind, but when you switch the camera, he’s sat there in the front seat alongside you. All very daft. Additionally, when you go to get your stretcher out of the ambulance, he often teleports to be right next to you. Very odd.

What were major annoyances in the first place, became insignificant in the wake of the issues we’ve outlined here. Pathfinding is generally quite broken, especially when an objective is below the road level you’re on. There’s no one way systems or traffic laws you’ll need to worry about as you did in Taxi Life, but it is a bit odd when you find a cyclist up on what amounts to a motorway and wondering why they’ve ended up a statistic. Though amusingly, you can be triaging casualties and be able to mark casualties in order of severity, yet there’ll be a freshly eviscerated corpse just laid in the road.

Cars generally move out of your way if you’re approaching them from behind with your siren on, but the game simply can’t cope with you approaching a queue of traffic from the side. It’s like driving down a busy A road in that regard where drivers won’t move out of the way, but it pales into insignificance in light of the other bugs.

In conclusion, we see the potential in Ambulance Life to be something better than what we ended up with, but sadly in its current form it’s a broken glitchy mess that we’ll struggle to recommend. Perhaps if a new patch comes out resolving matters things might improve, but for now, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator isn’t the one.