4/5: Sarah's very likable, and the game's fun. It can, however, get a bit monotonous at times.
DEVELOPER(S): RELEASE: ?
Note: The game developers seem to be rechristening the game with the title of "Sarah's Emergency Room" for some reason. Or maybe it's a regional variation?
Premise: Having just graduated from the University of California, nurse Sarah is busy job hunting. Unfortunately, she's been rejected every hospital she's applied for either due to lack of room or her lack of job experience. However, while rummaging through her cut-outs of newspaper job ad's, she spots a call from Maryville Medical Center. A break! It turns out one of their nurses is retiring. From then on, Sarah embarks on a quest to improve hospitals throughout the nation.
Gameplay: The game, being a time management game set in a hospital (in which I'm guessing is the ER), has you dashing from patient to patient, station to station, pharmacy to hospital bed. First, a patient enters the hospital and waits in the waiting area. You then drag the patient to the diagnostics station, where, afterwards, you drag the patient to where ever they need to go to, whether it's a hospital bed or a surgical platform. You also have to give them their prescription, or else treatment won't get started. (Note that some patients have to undergo multiple treatments.) After everything's done, you get money, and, being a nurse, you'll have to clean up whatever mess they've left behind if they've left any.
By the way, Nurse Sarah doesn't physically drag her patients around. It'll be your cursor picking up patients and dropping them off.
As the patients wait, their health (represented by hearts above their head) drops, and should it drop too low, they might even walk out of the hospital. You would think they wouldn't be healthy enough too, but they do. If you can't tend to the patient (say you don't have the equipment or you're simply overloaded), you can just drop them off in the ambulance. While they won't be treated (by the way you have a patient treatment quota for each day), you'll still get some funds out of it. And for some reason you also can drop patients out of the door. Kick them out. Yeah. Seriously.
At the beginning of each day, you can buy equipment, little things here and there to somehow lengthen your patients' patience (and thus their health—it turns out TV is a cancer retardant), and of course, increase funding for your pharmacy and your doctors' salaries. It's actually pretty hilarious how the game subtly suggests that medical specialists will become top of their field so long as they're given a little more egg. The light hearted and tongue-in-cheek atmosphere of the game really hits you suddenly, but it's not like it socks you in the face. It's actually very pleasant, like a spray of cold mist on a hot summer day.
Graphics: The game is predominantly rendered in 3D. It's not exactly eye candy, or worth mentioning, really. I personally think the game's appeal could've gone that much farther if everything was rendered in a whimsical 2D style, or even if every thing was cel shaded, but hey, I can't have everything. The 2D character designs, however, while few and far in between (all the senior nurses are represented with the same sprites), were all very appealing to me. While it's not exactly ADV CG quality, there's something endearing about the way Sarah is drawn. She's very easy to love. Even though throughout the game she doesn't show case her personality much.
Sound: The music is a bit of a techno, lounge, maybe "New Age" sort of thing. It's not annoying, not soothing (as maybe the developers hoped?), and not repetitive; it's pretty run-of-the-mill all around, but not bad in any way. I might mention that as your shift reaches its end, the tempo is considerably ramped up.
Every "type" of patient has his or her own unique lines, and at first, it's pretty funny. However, since all patients really have maybe five lines to themselves ("Watch it!" "Are you a mad person?"), things get repetitive or at least boring instantly. Even as you meet new patients (for example once you start in Albuquerque you start seeing juvenile patients), the whole thing has lost all of its novelty. I'm not asking for hundreds of lines per character type, but seriously, maybe instead of five get ten lines per person? -sighs-
Overall: The game, while I have issues with it here and there, and perhaps a bit of wasted potential, is really fun, and something you can really pour all your stress into. Though you may be unsure as to whether you should buy this game, I'd say if you do, it's probably on account of Sarah's design and the bubbly feel of the game. Really, it's the game's atmosphere that bumps it up to a four in my book.
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