Grey's Anatomy: The Video Game

The TV series Grey's Anatomy has been running since 2005 and over its five seasons we've seen flirting, bleeding and firing of cast members...but mostly flirting. The relationship conflicts among the students practicing medicine at Seattle Grace Hospital are much like in any other medical drama. What separates Grey's Anatomy from, say, E.R. Is a higher level of irony and greater emphasis on the staff's love lives.

The title refers A) to its main character Dr. Meredith Grey and B) to the popular medical book Gray's Anatomy, but this is really where the wit stops. The lure of the show is basically to see who will sleep with who, who'll cock up in surgery, and most importantly whether Meredith will shut up already and take Dr. Darcy - alright, Dr. Derek Shepherd - up the aisle (Matron!).

Quite how their antics were thought of as perfect fodder for a video game is a bit of a mystery, until you realise the makers probably played the Trauma Centre games (a Japanese hospital-set game involving surgeries performed directly by the player) and smelled a cash cow. Grey's Anatomy: The Videogame turns out to be better and worse than Trauma Centre; better in that the character animations are crisp and reasonably life-like in their mannerisms, but worse because the surgeries are far less challenging. So the game feels like an interactive soap opera more than anything else.

If you're a fan of the show this will be an enjoyable experience, since you get to decide things on behalf of the regular cast of characters. Or, if you're into games like Trauma Centre with an eye to studying actual medicine then you too will get something out of it. It's essentially a parallel series of the TV show in video game form. So the soap-opera approach might draw slightly more girls than guys, but there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

The game is split into acts (again suggesting the television show was the main reference point here) with your control of characters alternating throughout the various social and medical emergencies. You begin with Meredith, complete with her trademark voice-over, and have to decide for her if she should flirt with Derek or play it cool. In this sort of social environment you're told there are no wrong decisions, but that's not the case in surgery, where you are graded marks out of five and must repeat the operation if you botch it.