

That’s an operation that requires several very precise cuts on the intestines. Take for instance, your standard Kidney transplant surgery.

And when you’re tasked with removing and transplanting organs, precision isn’t exactly a necessary tool in your operating room.Īs the disembodied arm of Nigel Burke, players have to move around using the left stick, while controlling the hand and its fingers with the right analogue stick and the bumpers, or the motion controls of the Dual Shock controller to control hand angles. What the game is in essence, is a sandbox experience where players can fool around in the chest cavity of a victim patient, curing whatever ails them with good ol’ blunt force trauma and an endless supply of anaesthesia.
#Kidney transplant surgeon simulator simulator
“Surgeon Simulator isn’t exactly brain surgery, although players do get to do actual brain surgery during the course of several operations. There’s nothing really new in the way of content, so it’s all really the same operations you’ve possibly already done. We’ve already said the joke’s worn a bit thin now – and here, within VR, it’s stretched to the point of transparency.
#Kidney transplant surgeon simulator how to
Once you come to terms with how shoddy its controls are, and how to get around them rather than try to work with them, the game is as silly as it’s ever been, delivering on its promise of comedic surgical mishaps. It only becomes worse with the DualShock, which relies on the sometimes obscured light emanating from the controller. While it could be reasonably argued that it’s all part of Surgeon Simulator’s quirky core design, this takes it to absurd levels. If part of your hand happens to come in to contact with an in-game solid object, it becomes skeletal and floaty, so you have to pull back before trying to go back in.


Worse is that the game’s odd collision detection continually fights against the player. Scalpels, tweezer and other small instruments are sometimes impossible to grasp. It can be a nightmare just to pick up a tool, let a long try to use it. But that’s not the way it actually works. Or it should feel like you’re bunching a scalpel betwixt your thumb and index finger to allow for precision slicing. You’d imagine it would feel like you’re wielding the hammer you’ll use to smash open a ribcage. With both control schemes, you’ll have to depress buttons on the controller to activate specific fingers – so holding something firmly in your hand requires the sort of squeezing you’d imagine would feel natural. Surgeon Simulator’s never been accuracy or precision, but the implementation of its controls in VR is often such an impediment that it can make the game wholly unplayable, detracting from its whimsy. Controls – whether you opt for the pair of wands, or a single DualShock 4 – are frankly horrible. Somehow, in translation, everything’s gone through to the wrong extreme. It should have been simple to translate Surgeon Simulator’s imprecise controls to VR, using the already sometimes wonky Move controllers to great effect. It’s not that the idea doesn’t translate well, rather just that it’s been implemented horribly. I’d though that operating on poor old Bob again, just within a VR world this time, would be a jolly good, terribly silly time. Doing mundane, rote tasks – the stuff people habitually call work – within virtual reality gives it a new life, and makes that sort of humdrum oddly enjoyable. It seems a natural fit for the platform, especially after playing games like Job Simulator. When I heard that the perpetually silly Surgeon simulator would be making its way to Virtual Reality platforms, I was excited.
