Of all the many new PC games I saw at Gamescom 2024, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is among those that surprised me most. Following on from developer Aesir Interactive’s Police Simulator, the upcoming simulation game shifts across to another essential emergency service – the rapid response life of an ambulance paramedic. You’re in charge of answering calls, diagnosing the situation, providing initial treatment, and making sure to get the patient back to hospital in time to give them the best chance of survival, and it’s a remarkably compelling experience, especially as the stakes rack up.
Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator takes place across the three districts of San Pelicano, which Aesir confirms is “very Los Angeles coded.” There’s an industrial area, where you’ll face more heavy-duty accidents, a business zone, and the less built-up historic district. The challenges you’ll typically face across each region of the simulation game vary dramatically, and you can choose whether you prefer to work in a specific zone or if you’d like to deal with a mix of all three.
Once a call comes in, your first job is getting there as quickly as possible. Despite the team’s push for a realistic simulation in places, there are parts where they’ve pulled back to put a fun gameplay experience first. When driving, you’ll be able to burn around corners with dramatic handbrake turns, for example, and as you progress you’ll unlock ‘catastrophic events’ that might put you in situations like rescuing people from a burning building – a scenario that would be left to firefighters to deal with in real life, but Aesir included to give people some “climactic Michael Bay style experiences.”
Arrive at the patient, and the real work begins. You’ll ask the victim and any nearby witnesses questions to determine what happened, and can inspect the patient and surrounding area closely to look at any potential clues. As you do, your Patient Protocol tablet will begin to tick up everything you’ve seen, and will suggest the likelihood of potential diagnoses. Crucially, it’s not a perfect solution – in one case, I see it rate a neuropsychiatric problem highest, but I know from just looking at the patient that external bleeding is a more critical problem.
Diagnosis complete, you can move the patient to the ambulance and get to work saving their life. With 36 different conditions to diagnose and 17 instruments to help further narrow down issues and treat them, you’ll have plenty to consider, and you need to act appropriately. If a patient has an arm injury, for example, you’ll need to place the blood pressure monitor on their other side. A dose of morphine might be a useful aid, but could be dangerous if you suspect the patient has recently taken drugs – something they might not willingly tell you themselves.
Once you think you’ve got it all in your head, you can push your skills to the limit in the immersive simulation mode. Here, the guard rails are dropped and you’ll no longer get the suggested diagnosis numbers and other such hints; it’s up to you and your bible of conditions to determine the correct procedure based purely on your own knowledge and intuition. I really like this – while there’s obviously even more nuance to the real-life equivalent, what’s here feels like you’re out there doing the job, and that’s a great achievement.
Ambulance Life is set to launch on PC and consoles in 2024. If you think you’re up to the challenge of saving lives, or want to see how you’d fare in such high-stress situations, you can wishlist it now on Steam.
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