Amateur Surgeon 4 is a gloriously disgusting game. It revels in its vileness, pushing you to ever more unhygienic lengths in order to satisfy its overwhelming desire to make you feel a bit icky on the inside. It’s the sort …
Amateur Surgeon 4 is a gloriously disgusting game. It revels in its vileness, pushing you to ever more unhygienic lengths in order to satisfy its overwhelming desire to make you feel a bit icky on the inside.
It’s the sort of game that lets you use a pizza cutter to open up a patients abdomen. That allows you to start fires inside people whenever you fancy it. That gives you a stapler and tells you it’s a medical instrument that you should definitely put to good use.
And this latest entry in the series does away with some of the problems of the last, letting you roll up your sleeves and poke around in the cavities of a variety of weird and wacky characters to your heart’s content. Or just about to your heart’s content anyway.
The game sees you playing the reincarnated, memory-wiped clone of the surgeon star of the first few games. Hence you need to learn the tricks of your trade again, getting to grips with the various instruments at your disposal, then using them to save a variety of lives.
Those instruments include a vacuum cleaner, a lighter, a chainsaw, a pizza cutter, and a tub of suspiciously green goo that you use to soothe wounds. With these rudimentary tools you need to patch up, pluck out, and mangle a series of patients as best you can.
Everything is controlled with taps and swipes. Tap top choose the instrument you want to use, then swipe along the screen to use it. You might be using tongs to pull out spikes of glass stuck in a burglar’s spleen, or using a chainsaw to hack out someone else’s ruined organs.
Each level has a time limit and a score you’re trying to beat. The better your score, the more stars and coins you’re rewarded at the end of the challenge. Fail to finish under the time limit though and you have to go through the whole procedure again.
There are a variety of currencies and cards that you need to use to upgrade your tools and hire new assistants. Those assistants are all of the very weird variety, but they give you a sort of special move that you can use to get yourself out of tricky situations.
The more of them you have the better, since they all run on cool down timers. Once you’ve used one you’re going to have to wait a good few hours before you can use them again. For the most part though you’ll be able to get through the levels unaided.
And the whole thing is an entertaining and engaging mobile experience. You’ll find the more you play the quicker your fingers get, and soon you’ll be sweeping around the screen methodically, removing debris, stitching up gaping wounds and finishing everything off with a nice soothing dollop of balm.
It’s ridiculous, it’s gross and there’s a wonderfully vile sense of humour running through everything the game asks you to do. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes, but most of them manage to hit the mark in one way or another.
If you fancy yourself a dab hand at amateur surgery, or you just like the idea of using a lighter to attach a healthy lung in the space you just cut a diseased one out of with a chainsaw, then this is exactly the sort of game you should be looking at getting.
