I get the feeling that Evan was dissatisfied with my recommendation of Atom Zombie Smasher, which I think it’s hella fun, but I was telling him that when I was at work before I had a customer come in, so I couldn’t quite finish my explanation on that day. Regardless, we had a riveting conversation yesterday that went roughly like this:
Evan: “If I bought you a game from Steam, would you play it and review it on YNTE?”
Me: “Yeah sure”
An hour later, Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game was gifted to me.
As I must maintain my journalistic integrity, here is the review of the 40 minutes I could stand playing the Game. Don’t believe that I played for 40 minutes? It’s all saved on livestream, as I was streaming to some other onlookers that really wanted to see how terrible this game was. Click here for a video, but skip to about 4:30. (I was fiddling around with the streaming beforehand).
The first thing that bugged me about this game was that the install was 4 gigabytes. What did I get myself into? I overlooked this fact and installed it. When it was done, it began running in windowed mode at 800×600 resolution. My monitor is 1920×1200, so I thought I’d see if I could possibly make it any bigger. I couldn’t.
In any case, I decided to start a new game.
A promising title screen, I guess…
Then there’s about 5 seconds of stock footage of Seattle. I guess it introduces the setting, but were the animators really too busy to reconstruct the Space Needle in CGI? And then it all changed to the animations.
Holy hell, everything is cel-shaded and cartooney. It doesn’t really match the style of a live action television show… So anyway I started watching this character have some dialogue with another, and all of a sudden a minigame pops up! It was simple, and I figured introductory… but the choice was “How do I get Derek’s attention? Be flirtatious or play hard to get?” And I had the sudden horrible realization: I’m playing a terrible dating sim game, but instead of dating I am following a TV drama, and doing bad surgery.
Now the minigames… the surgery ones were too simple. The non-surgery ones were weird and abstract, and based off of non-existent things. “Collect Anger and avoid Cool!” “Click a mirror to turn it on or off!” MIRRORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
For one of the surgeries, the “challenge” was to hold a catheter still so it could be put in a vein. This involved holding my mouse PERFECTLY STILL while I clicked.
I think I did it. It was about at this point of the game that I couldn’t take it anymore. Your mouse cursor was terribly big for how imprecise it was. The graphics didn’t fit the mood of the content. And lastly, it was boring.
The game’s metascore was 36/100, and I have come to the consensus that it earned every penny. The voice acting was good, but it is sorry to see their talent go to such waste.
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[...] year, I bought my friend Matt Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game, because I am a jerk. He retaliated by getting me Cthulu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, [...]