Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator Review

I admire anyone who works within the NHS here in the UK. Not only is it criminally underfunded by our government, but I believe most of the staff that hold it together are overworked and underpaid. Being a paramedic is something that always intrigued and interested me but even the sight of blood sends me to the brink of passing out. Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator enters the gaming space where there appears to be a simulator game for everything including showering with your dad. Admittedly when I saw this title announced for the first time, I was a little excited as the concept is fantastic but is the execution as promising?

Lives Are In Your Hands

Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator sets you off as a rookie paramedic with a seemingly experienced colleague. You’ll spend the early portion of the game learning the game mechanics. You’ll be shown how to drive your ambulance through heavy traffic, how to activate the sirens and how to respond to emergency calls. As with most games, you’ll start with the straightforward and easier jobs. Eventually, you’ll progressively learn more and as you unlock more of the city map you’ll encounter serious catastrophic emergencies that you’ll be expected to deal with. This is where the experience comes to life and becomes the most enjoyable part of the game.

Everything is played from a third-person perspective on the outside of the ambulance including the driving elements. The focus then switches to first person when engaging with casualties, conversation and treating people in the back of the back of the ambulance. I did find the UI when serving treatment a little confusing to navigate at first, but you do become used to it after some time. There is a great variance of different emergency scenarios that will crop up from something seemingly quite tame like an anxiety issue or a fall to more extreme cases like attempted suicides. Quite often you’ll need to think about which patients to prioritise and treat first for the best chance of survival.

Patch Those Wounds

The meat and potato of the game is probably the triage and treatment process. I liked the fact that sometimes it wasn’t always obvious what the issue was and you have to make a solid judgement call and assessment by analysing particular portions of the body. If it is a breathing issue and no blood is in sight, it becomes clear eventually that you won’t need to get the bandages out. Treatment comes in the form of mini-games and selections throughout the huge range of options which will unlock the more you level up as a paramedic. It is satisfying if you have made a good strong assessment before treatment and then administered the correct aid to your patient. This is all indicated with a unique scoring system and you’ll get some indications early on to hint whether you’re doing the right thing.

Visuals & Audio

Overall the presentation is very hit-and-miss with Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator, but mostly a miss from my perspective. The city itself is well constructed and from a design perspective, they have captured the feel and atmosphere within that urban built-up environment well. Buildings feel true to scale and the setting overall does feel lived in with pedestrians and traffic congestion. That said, the robotic nature of how pedestrians run out of the way as your ambulance races towards them looks unnatural and is the same animation every time. I understand that this isn’t GTA and you’re not going to be mowing people down, but it became laughable eventually.

Traffic movement is probably the most frustrating part of the game for me. It looks like vehicles make an effort to make a path for your blue lights, but it got to the stage where I was just driving onto the wrong side of the road to get past anything as it was much more bearable, even if this would rarely happen in the real world. The aesthetics and visual design of the ambulance itself are fantastic with authentic sounding sirens. A lot of the voice-acting did humour me as it was quite cheesy, to say the least. There are better-looking simulator titles out there, sadly this needs some work to iron out the several bugs I encountered.

Final Thoughts

Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator was disappointing and didn’t meet my expectations. I encountered a myriad of bugs throughout the experience, repetitive dialogue and gameplay, and poor visuals. This is unfortunate, as the concept and the way some of the scenarios are put together are fantastic. This isn’t to say there isn’t fun to be had here and you’ll struggle to find an experience that is on par and as accurate within the ambulance/paramedic genre. I do feel though that this game could have been done with a little more time in the oven to give it some extra polish and perhaps that will come in the form of future updates. There is plenty within the gameplay loop here for a good 20+ hours or maybe longer if you enjoy grinding your way through everything on offer.