I have an irrational fear of anything medical. A single pain in my body and I quickly head to the emergency room. Each time it's nothing, and I'm sent on my way with what are more than likely placebos.
With that in mind, the very thought of playing Surgeon Simulator 2 should chill me to my core; even watching a simple medical procedure in a movie is enough to send me diving behind the couch.
Yet despite my tricky nature, I found myself hacking patients in Surgeon Simulator 2, laughing at the absurdity of the game with each new cut of the knife.
With cooperative multiplayer and a new approach to level design, Surgeon Simulator 2 is bigger, better and more elaborate than the first installment. Its changes go beyond the skin, introducing completely new gameplay systems and dozens of new ways to engage in hilarious yet cathartic antics.
In a year where the medical world has become a real nightmare, Surgeon Simulator 2 lifts the mood of many people who have spent the majority of the last few months under cover.
Surgeon Simulator 2 review: I have a fever in my bones
The gameplay of Surgeon Simulator 2 has evolved significantly from its predecessor. No more constraints related to the execution of operations in a single part. Instead, the game's entire environment is fully explorable, filled with physics-based challenges to overcome and operations to perform.
Propelling this new open design is the inclusion of a narrative that moves players from one elaborate stage to the next. While Surgeon Simulator often felt like a drug episode of Scrubs, its sequel often feels like an Operation game if crafted by the team behind the Saw series. (Imagine a group of people locked in a room with no escape and forced to attempt surgery on an unconscious patient, then you're in the right ballpark.)
Spread across multiple stages, the Surgeon Simulator 2 campaign lets players slash and chop solo or co-op. They can do this with up to three other players as they help a patient named Bob undergo several procedures.
These range from a heart transplant to literally replacing his head with a new one (which is dispensed from a machine like a can of Coke). If that sounds stupid, that's because it is, and Surgeon Simulator 2 embraces that stupidity from its first moments.
It doesn't take long before the plot twists and veers down the path of dark comedy, very much in the vein of Portal. While it never reaches the dizzying heights of the games it draws inspiration from, the story is worth cutting.
The journey to the endgame is extended by its fully explorable environments, where players explore each escape room-like level while finding the best ways to operate Bob and move on to the next procedural.
Sometimes operating utensils are hidden, requiring you to search high and low for them before beginning an operation. Other times, an organ you need is locked behind a door, but that door is locked by a fuse, and that fuse is locked behind another door, forcing you to find another way through and around.
These challenges only grow in complexity as the narrative progresses, imbuing the fairly mundane walkthroughs with vim and vigor, because while performing the walkthroughs on Bob is fun at first, it isn't long before repetition of each objective comes into play.
There are only a few items Bob will need during each operation, and Surgeon Simulator will have you repeating the same procedures over and over and over again.
Fortunately, Surgeon Simulator 2's physics-based controls make seemingly simple tasks a nightmare - in all the best ways.
Holding a saw with your little finger while you cut through one of Bob's limbs is a sight to behold, and even better to be seen in co-op. Wriggling your arm to find the perfect angle is often hilarious, even if it gets a little tedious after several operations.
Apart from the fairly short 3-4 hour campaign, Surgeon Simulator 2's creative mode leverages user-created content to increase the game's replay value.
The sheer number of tools available is frankly staggering, and the imagination that's already been pumped into the mode will only expand with time. Even though some of the levels available are quite simple at the moment, there are levels such as mazes and even bowling alleys ready to dive into at launch. No doubt that over the months the community will find new and interesting ways to breathe new life into this mode.
That's because even building those levels is a joy, invoking the creative inspiration found in something like The Sims. The rooms are built through a manual filled with articles, and bringing in friends to coordinate the ideas is a stroke of genius.
Surgeon Simulator 2 exam – The final score
Advantages:
- Fun evolution of the original concept
- Cooperation is a blast
- Surprisingly engaging narrative
The inconvenients:
- Operations can become repetitive
- Short campaign
- Bulky controls
While some sequels fail to build on the entries that came before them, turning into a bloated, convoluted mess, Surgeon Simulator 2 retools the original idea into something entirely new.
It doesn't all come together, the campaign is short, the surgeries can get repetitive, and the physics-based controls can get in the way of the fun at times. But it's hard not to admire the creativity that drives the evolution of this sequel.
For better or worse, Surgeon Simulator 2 is something entirely different and a game that builds a solid foundation for a solid future.
(Note: Bossa Studios provided the copy of Surgeon Simulator 2 used for this review.)
