Straight off the back of the successful Police Simulator, developers Aesir Interactive have given us another glimpse into the life of front-line responders, this time we are saving lives not taking them in Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator.
Published by Nacon, Ambulance Life has us follow our Paramedic from receiving emergency callouts right through to dropping patients off at the nearest hospital and every stressful decision in between.
Rough First Impressions
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, visually Ambulance Life is rough. Textures don’t always load. Cars just appear from out of the void. Character models look like they are Frankenstein’s monster with different skin textures. Voice lines are repeated over the top of each other, optimisation is a mess.
However, the heart and soul of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulators gameplay loop is a fun stressful encounter that I am thoroughly enjoying. So let’s get behind the wheel and respond to our first call.
Our First Shift
Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator let’s you choose a Paramedic from a list, these are purely cosmetic. I chose Mateo, he seems like a decent chap.
Getting behind the wheel of your Ambulance feels great. Aesir Interactive have done a great job with the handling of your vehicle. Unfortunately, when your lights and sirens are on the civilian vehicles are supposed to move out of the way. They don’t always leave you enough room to manoeuvre leaving you trapped between cars and trucks. You can’t trust the lights either, cars run red lights, and even the pedestrians can just run out in front of you causing you to instantly fail.
You will receive dispatch calls throughout your shift that you must attend to. These could be for any situation from someone having trouble breathing to a multi car pile-up; a house fire or gunshot victim. You get given all the basic info on the way to the callout.
First to Arrive
When you arrive, you must secure the scene and plan your course of action. There could be anywhere from 1 to even 4 patients per callout. Upon arrival you must visually assess each patient to see if there is anything pressing mainly trouble breathing or sitting in pools of blood. You can apply a tourniquet to stop any excessive bleeding or perform a tracheostomy to clear airways.
Next is the ‘questions’ phase. The patients all have spoken lines in which they will answer your questions. There seems to be a very small pool of random answers that are given that sometimes have no relevance to the question asked. Seems like everyone in the city gets headaches and uses incense to calm them.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Once you have spoken to all the patients now the real task begins. Who has the most severe injuries? As you can only take one, sometimes it’s an easy decision other times its quite literally life or death.
Grab the stretcher out of the ambulance, (which has got inverted steering for some weird reason) and get the patient into the ambulance.
Next step is to diagnose a Category and Interim Diagnosis by taking a look at the information gathered. You can then follow a course of actions to stabilise the patient. Be careful on your diagnosis as this can be wrong and send you down the wrong path.
There are two separate difficulties: Simulation which gives you no help what so ever or Classic which holds your hand every step of the way.
There are 17 different medical instruments available. Like monitoring vitals, applying bandages to cuts and burns. You will need to use the stethoscope to check airways and even do emergency tracheotomies. You also get the chance to administer Glucose, Lorazepam and Saline Solution. Some of them have mini games that need to be successfully completed. These can become tiresome, considering how many bandages you have to apply, if i have to do one more zig zag while tapping Y I’m going to scream. Once you have the patient stabilised it’s off to the hospital.
Rinse and Repeat.
Ambulance Life starts your new profession in Downtown. There are 36 different situations that you will be called to that are unlocked as you progress through each region. However, even after unlocking new situations they never seem to come up. It always the same 5 or 6 repeating. There are 3 separate regions of the city you will unlock through successful shifts. Again I think it’s an optimisation problem but no matter where you start your shift every callout is in Downtown.
Catastrophic Event
Eventually you will unlock Catastrophic Event. These events will put everything you have learnt to the test.
These play out a little differently. You arrive on scene and must rush against the clock to save as many people as you can.
Once you have diagnosed as many patients as you can a makeshift triage centre is set up onsite and those who survived still need medical attention. Just like a regular shift you must categorize and decide on Interim Diagnosis and treat accordingly. Then the most severe patients are rushed to the hospital. It’s almost like the end game. Every medical procedure you know will be used.
Final Verdict
Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator needs a lot of polishing work. The core gameplay loop is extremely addictive. Trying to master all the different procedures and figure out what instruments go where keeps you on your toes. It’s unfortunate that Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is missing so many of the final polishing touches, that take away from the meat and bones that makes it a great simulation game.
Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator was reviewed on Xbox Series X and I would like to thank Nacon for supplying a review code.
Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is available on PC (via steam), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S from the 6th of Feb 2025
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