In a world of evolving video game technology, it has become increasingly easier to simulate almost any job or experience. While these simulator games rarely give you a perfect look into the lives of the professions you choose to simulate, they can provide a good enough glimpse to satisfy your curiosity or cultivate a bit more empathy for the people who really live them. Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator, as the title suggests, offers that glimpse into the world of our first responders. While there are some immersion-breaking elements, it generally does a pretty good job.
It is hard for me to overstate the respect I have for first responders and emergency service workers, especially those in the healthcare field. While I chose to make my living writing, I have several family members who work in healthcare, including an aspiring paramedic. While I always understood that they must have a huge amount of education, dedication, and endurance to do their jobs, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator helped me appreciate the realities of their lives just a little bit more.
As the title suggests, the gameplay of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator puts you in the role of a paramedic. After a few training scenarios that will teach you to use the basic tools of your trade, as well as the procedures for different types of accidents, you are let loose as a paramedic in an almost open-world format. This is done through shifts, which essentially put you on call for a selected amount of time. During this time, you must respond to various accidents and ambulance calls throughout your selected district, catering to each specific incident with the correct procedure and rushing patients to the hospital.
An incident typically involves a couple of stages. First, upon receiving a call, you must navigate your ambulance through traffic and make it to the scene without hitting any pedestrians or causing a collision. This is something you can disable in the options, but why would you? You’re not a very good paramedic if you cause more accidents on your way to one.
Next, you must respond to the situation as you see fit. Typically, you want to get a patient on the stretcher and into the ambulance as soon as possible. A series of diagnostic and treatment options become available in the ambulance. While you can ignore procedure and just ferry the patient to the hospital, it is best to perform life-saving care on the scene, reducing the chances of your patient dying en route. Properly diagnosing the patient’s condition also earns you a better score and more XP at the end of an incident.
The amount of treatment options available is pretty staggering, especially as you complete more cases and unlock the full range of available procedures. Sometimes, all a patient might need is a vitals check and a bandage. Other times, you will need to apply tourniquets, administer drugs via IV, provide an oxygen mask, etc. While the game may provide you with some pointers based on the information you glean from your diagnostic work, it is up to you to diagnose patients and choose what treatment, if any, to give them before reaching the hospital. It can be incredibly stressful, especially in your first cases, where you don’t know exactly what to do yet.
After treatment, you have to get your patients to the emergency room. This process can be difficult when not all cars obey traffic laws, and small collisions can make the difference between your patient’s life and death. This is not a criticism; I really like the realism factor this provides. I actually live right next to a major street and can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen ambulances and fire trucks, with their sirens blaring, have to stop and lay on the horn because someone in the road isn’t paying attention. Different complications can also arise during transit, requiring you to make split-second decisions based on your procedure knowledge to try and help.
Overall, the gameplay in Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is great. The HUD can be a little overwhelming to navigate, and the lengthy tutorials can be a little annoying, but generally, you’re going to want to play them in order to understand what to do anyway. What is awkward about the tutorials is that they lock out certain equipment until after you complete them, but they won’t stop you from playing the game without completing all of the tutorials. This means you can go out on a 15-minute shift, run into a patient bleeding to death, and not have the tourniquet needed to treat them because you haven’t played that tutorial mission yet.
There are mild cases of graphical errors that can be a little immersion-breaking. For example, every time I went to the hospital, one of the on-staff nurse practitioners had his head and shoulders disconnected and floating above his body. I also had issues with textures loading in late at times, and my PC far exceeded the game’s recommended specs.
Medical professionals might notice inaccuracies here or there; I played with an RN looking over my shoulder and judging some of these inaccuracies rather harshly. However, for the average gamer just looking to see what being a life-saving paramedic is like Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is absolutely a great game to do it in.
The Final Word
Though it has some graphical errors and mild inaccuracies, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator provides an incredible simulation of Paramedic life, one that can be as stressful as it is satisfying to play.
Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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