Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator

There’s a wide range of realism that’s reflected in vocational simulations. On one end of this spectrum, you have fanciful games like Crazy Taxi. In real life, soaring jumps and near-collisions with cars don’t tend to fabricate tips, making this a rather fanciful interpretation of cab driving. On the other hand, fastidious flight sims like Digital Combat Simulator and X-Plane can seem impenetrable without investing hours wading through tutorials.

Then there’s Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator, a game that’s spread all over the continuum of authenticity. Although it seems to strive for seriousness, unintentional laughs might stem from the game’s procession of glitches, bugs, and creepy character models.

San Fran sans charm

After selecting an avatar from one of eight different paramedics, you’ll start your first shift in downtown San Pellicano, an obvious stand-in for San Francisco. Here, a two-stage instructional stint led by your partner reveals the fundamentals of your workday. You’ll start by responding to 911 calls and driving through town to access the injured. After arriving on scene, you’ll perform a preliminary assessment through a process called anamnesis.

Depending on the patient’s condition, you might put them on a stretcher and load them in the back of the ambulance to stabilize their condition. Simple mini-games attempt to reproduce everything from wrapping a bleeding wound with a bandage to inserting a cannula to administer intravenous drugs.

Often, you’ll end the process by transporting them to their nearest hospital. Wisely, Ambulance Life shirks most of the record-keeping duties, automatically recording information into an in-game tablet, so you can focus on the more salient parts of paramedic work. But woefully, Paramedic Simulator’s different components are so uneven, aspiring medics will likely resign after a few callouts.

The Hypocritical Oath

At present, driving through traffic is frustrating. When you hit the sirens, expect the residents of San Pellicano to be oblivious to your ambulance. In reality, drivers are supposed to pull over to the edges of the roadway to make room for emergency vehicles. But here, there’s little reaction from NPCs, with attempts at lane splitting likely racking up thousands of dollars in cosmetic damage and a glib comment from your coworker. But at least drivers are indifferent. Pedestrians embrace danger by sporadically jumping in front of your speeding ambulance. As such, the average 911 call might save one life but puts dozens of others in peril.

Beyond becoming the Grim Reaper of EMTs, A Paramedic Simulator becomes darkly comical in other ways. One early callout found an injured biker in a park. Attempting to bring out the stretcher became a comedy of errors, as my AI coworker and I fumbled with one of the most awkward control schemes found in a contemporary game. Who knew that a gurney had a turning radius of a damaged World War II tank?

Similarly, Paramedic Simulator seems to give a sarcastic skewering of the American Health Care system. When a patient was having a panic attack, the game suggested a dose of ketamine to help them get back on track. In real life, this is typically given to combative patients, rather than a patient needing slower breathing and perhaps, a bit of oxygen. Ambulance Life’s application of paramedic protocol is often suspect. I probably could have used some mild sedation of my own when the game forced me to question a bystander first instead of speaking directly with the clearly coherent patient.

Head Trauma

One of Ambulance Life’s most egregious missteps is its absence of common sense. All too often, the cause of the injury is plainly apparent, whether it’s a misshapen bicycle or a sparking electrical panel rendered next to the victim. But you’ll still have to follow the game’s rigid procedures of anamnesis which require selecting ailments on your EMS iPad and following the advice of the app’s interim diagnosis.

Here, developer Aesir Interactive’s warns that machines are helpful, but shouldn’t always be trusted. Unfortunately, that reminder doesn’t make for a compelling interactive experience, when Paramedic Simulator sporadically glitches out during the diagnosis. Sadly, I lost a patient when the medical tablet told me to administer a treatment that was still locked off. Between the traffic casualties and the botched callouts, San Pellicano is going to be hit with a legion of lawsuits.

But accidentally taking lives isn’t the only unnerving moment. There’s some nightmare fodder when oxygen mask cables spring to life and convulse like a half-crushed spider. Yet, for every fright, animations also provided just as many laughs, like when NPCs perform the same balancing stunt that Jackie Chan did in Meals on Wheels. Voice acting is barely any better. Often, victims sound like they’re bored rather than in pain.

Twice the Frustration is Your Reward

A Paramedic Simulator rather linear approach to assisting and transporting victims can’t be faulted; that’s the nature of the job. But the developer’s attempt at making medical responses more stimulating backfires. The game’s shifts are manageable in 15-minute increments, but when that’s doubled, a simulated day generates real-world fatigue. You’ll eventually open up two additional districts in San Pellicano but the suburbs are even more generic than a downtown that looks built from free assets.

While A Paramedic Simulator escalates the intensity of events, requiring you to assess and transport multiple victims to different triages, the scenario exceeds the limits of plausibility. Yes, despite how far the city stretches out, this is a single-ambulance town. As such, you’ll probably want to work elsewhere. I hear there are plenty of other opportunities in farming, truck driving, and fighter pilot sims. Likely, they’re all more enjoyable and polished than Ambulance Life.

Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.