Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator what an odd idea forgame (Nacon)Its already been a busy year for exciting new games, with a number of highly rated titles, but Ambulance Life is not one of themSimulators are a strange business. While most video games are built with the sole intention of entertaining you (or on mobile, shaking you down for spare change), simulators frequently let entertainment take a back seat to authenticity. That may give them a narrower appeal, but for those obsessed with a particular job or pastime, whether thats pilot, arable farmer, or in this case, paramedic, it gives players a chance to engage in unusually deep role-play.Set in the fictional city of San Pellicano, whose peculiar claim to fame is that its home to some of the worlds finest EMTs, its hills, giant suspension bridge, and bay area suggest its at least loosely based on San Francisco. Access to the city is initially confined to a single district, but as you gain experience and level up you unlock two more.As with most simulators, its focus on its subject matter is total, so while you can choose the cosmetic appearance of your paramedic and their partner from a short list, all youll be doing is shifts of ambulance work, which start out as 15-minute forays into San Pellicano. Running to your vehicle youll receive an emergency call within seconds, leaving you to find its location on a map, and let your sat nav plot a route.Plunging straight into the appalling traffic jams that plague the city at all times of the day, switching on your sirens encourages drivers to edge very slightly out of the lane theyre stuck in, creating narrow gullies, which youll need to follow. For some reason practically every traffic light is stuck on red, so junctions tend to be clear, letting you navigate corners with relative ease, before having to negotiate the next car park-style boulevard.The developers were clearly excited by the possibilities offered by PlayStations DualSense controller, so youll find the adaptive triggers offer a bit of resistance as you accelerate and brake, while the wailing sirens of your ambulance are also broadcast through the controllers speaker. Its a feature that rapidly degenerates from curiosity, through mild irritation, to pestilential torment as you come to realise just how much of that sound youll be listening to.While your siren helps slightly with traffic it also has an effect on pedestrians; for some reason making them run along the pavement in pathetic little herds, even when theyre nowhere near the road. Ironically, on the rare occasion you do have to mount the pavement, even with your sirens blaring youll find single pedestrians strolling along in front of the strobing lights of your ambulance without a care in the world. Thats a particular problem because if you hit one its game over.Having negotiated the clogged streets and cretinous foot traffic, youll arrive at your emergency. Leaping from the ambulance, your first job is to assess the casualties. Although initially there may only be one or two, as you progress there are frequently multiple injured parties and even corpses. That means youll need to triage the wounded, working out whose condition demands the most urgent care.You do that using a couple of techniques. The first is anamnesis, which is paramedic jargon for talking to the patient, asking questions about whats happened and their medical history, before trying to calm them down. It only takes a few patients to realise how completely pointless that process is, with the victims limited range of canned responses telling you absolutely nothing.Far more useful is a visual inspection, undertaken by aiming at a series of white dots on the patients body. Once youve paused to look at every single dot, you can get out your medical iPad, which will then tell you whats wrong with them, ranked by severity. Fairly obviously, breathing difficulties are more urgent than skin abrasions, while spurting arterial blood trumps everything else. Dont worry, the magic iPad will know what to do (Nacon)That requires an immediate tourniquet, but for all other conditions youll need to grab a stretcher from the ambulance and stow the patient inside to stabilise their condition. Once you and the patient are safely in the ambulance, youll need to attach a blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygenation, and then address any other symptoms they have, which are conveniently listed in an on-screen checklist.Hilariously poor mini-games accompany a clutch of common procedures, so inserting a cannula into a patients arm, so that you can administer drugs, is done using a swinging pointer, a bit like taking a shot in an early 2000s golf game. Applying a bandage requires you to follow a swirly line with the left analogue stick, occasionally hitting a rhythm action-style button when prompted. Its so low effort its actually comedic.Every patient needs a visual inspection, blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter, a process that rapidly becomes repetitious. Many also need a cannula and oxygen mask, and even when more exotic conditions start popping up, because your iPad tells you exactly whats wrong and what to do next, every treatment becomes a futile game of Simon Says, as you blandly follow the checklist before hopping back into the drivers seat for another trip through braindead traffic jams to the hospital. The mini-games are all awful (Nacon)Your ambulance can smash through stop signs and fire hydrants, but lamp posts and traffic lights bring you to a grinding halt, something players of Grand Theft Auto will need to get used to. Not that you can use driving skills honed in other video games. Crashing into cars or pedestrians, and making sudden manoeuvres is strictly forbidden.They prompt your partner to intone, Please drive more carefully. Think of our patient, delivered in a flat monotone every time you crest a hill, take a corner too quickly or touch a kerb, which can be on well over half a dozen occasions in a single trip. That and the godawful siren noises issuing from your controller are enough to test even the saintliest patience.More TrendingNumerous conditions and accident varieties only become available as you progress, so if you play long enough you can look forward to getting your latex-gloved hands on patients suffering from ventricular fibrillation, epinephrin overdose, punctured lungs, and venomous spider bites amongst a host of other potentially lethal ailments. Youll also eventually unlock 30 minute shifts, extending the ordeal into the realms of psychological torture.Taxis have ads on the roofs that say AD or place your ad here, as though nobody could be bothered to come up with anything relevant or interesting, so defaulted to dry placeholders. Its a design ethos that echoes through the entire game. That includes the voice acting, which is almost surreally lacklustre, especially amongst the patients who sound universally wooden and mildly apathetic, even when their injuries are catastrophic.Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is so abjectly terrible it actually manages to trigger nostalgia. Its endless minor glitches and budgetary limitations harken back to a simpler age of PlayStation 2 games, when dross like this used to get pumped out all the time. Its easy to forget how much better games have got over the intervening decades. Or at least most of them.Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator review summaryIn Short: An excruciatingly underdeveloped take on the life of a paramedic in a fictitious American city, ruined by rote action, terrible AI, and lifeless mini-games.Pros: Shifts are initially only 15 minutes long and you will accidentally learn about how to treat a wide range of injuries, albeit only when your medical iPad tells you what they are.Cons: Highly repetitive, boring mini-games, countless minor glitches, poor voice acting, annoying use of the DualSense speaker, and clumsy controls.Score: 2/10Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: 34.99Publisher: NaconDeveloper: Aesir InteractiveRelease Date: 6th February 2025Age Rating: 16 Even turning on the woo-woos gets annoying (Nacon)Emailgamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below,follow us on Twitter, andsign-up to our newsletter.To submit Inbox letters and Readers Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use ourSubmit Stuff page here.For more stories like this,check our Gaming page.GameCentralSign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content.This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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