SURGEON SIMULATOR: EXPERIENCE REALITY

Ship it straight to the morgue

Surgeon Simulator is a riot of laughs that plays on the macabre, the silly, and sometimes the gross. But in VR, all that madness is held back by dodgy motion tracking and frustrating controls.

The PS VR version of the game is basically Operation in virtual reality, where you must perform a range of invasive procedures with very little medical knowledge. The aim is to remove and replace some of your unfortunate patient’s vital organs without killing them using a range of appropriate – and not so appropriate – tools.

You can use either the standard PS4 pad or a pair of PS Move controllers, but as the latter gives you a proper set of hands, they make much more sense. Sadly, the tracking is so problematic, it makes trying to pick up any of the tools nearly impossible. 1 Regularly I’m shown a skeleton outline of my hands, suggesting they are out of sight of the camera (they aren’t) or aren’t in the correct grabbing position (they are). The resulting mess means my victi-, er, patient ends up bleeding from multiple puncture wounds within seconds. What is this? A Doc PlayStation simulator? (Oh, maybe it is.)

It’s such a shame because it looks fantastic, I already know it’s hilarious fun and there’s plenty of intentional bumbling to be done. But with terrible tracking and a tricky to navigate UI, 2 virtual reality surgery doesn’t even give you a chance at a messy victory. There isn’t even good news when you swap to DualShock 4, as it just feels unwieldy. Maybe with another update Surgeon Sim will be a slice of VR brilliance, but until then, it’s time to pull the plug and call it.

FOOTNOTES1 A post-release patch has improved things a little, but not nearly enough. 2 It’s ridiculously unfriendly and fiddly. You’d have more success performing actual surgery with this hammer.