The story revolves around two Doctors - Derek Stiles, the archetypical young buck just out of university & Nozomi Weaver, transferred from a Japanese hospital, harbouring a dark secret from her past. The player must use both these characters through various missions, learning different skills & refining their ability to operate on patients. Once finished, the player is scored on various requirements & graded accordingly.

Operations are played out using the Wiimote & the Nunchuck to perform various surgical procedures, including (but not exclusively) suturing, tumour extraction & broken bone re-alignment. Each operation must be carried out within a strict time limit, with very little margin for error. This creates a palpable sense of tension, with the slightest hesitation causing serious problems and leaving very little time to finish within the required time frame. Also having to make sure that a patients vitals are kept in the green, makes multitasking a necessity. The movie stereotype of a nurse feverishly wiping a surgeons brow springs to mind immediately.

While this title worked perfectly on the DS, the transition to the Wii`s control method hasn’t been smooth. In some cases progression can be hampered through no fault of the player. Confidence is never truly afforded to the wiimote pointer. In some of the more intensive operations, where multiple problems compete for attention, it can lead to something being overlooked & result in a failure which is particularly galling. The random feel to proceedings, where completing a mission becomes a fluke as opposed to any skill on the part of the player is hard to take. Some of the more difficult manoeuvres become wrist-breaking in their execution on the Wii. Trying to place shattered bone fragments back into place results in an almost dislocated wrist from the player as they attempt to manipulate it using the Wiimote.

Another issue concerns the "Healing Touch", a skill acquired as you progress. To activate it, you must press Z on the nunchuck then draw a pentagram with the Wiimote onto the patient to slow down time. While adding another level of interactivity, sloppy execution in trying to draw it correctly leads to even more frustration. The feeling of muddling through never properly leaves and does much to break the illusion of being in control of the situation.

When the controls & objectives work, the game feels more rounded andcontrollable. Tumour Extraction & Bomb Disposal misssions are high points and help distance itself from the more frustrating elements of the game. It makes the player wonder just how good the game would have been if more time had been spent on creating either a new game, or content purely for the Wii version. Unfortunately, the good missions are few and far between and all too soon the player is back to fumbling their way through familiar territory.

The use of static backgrounds with text dialogue to tell the story is jarring in this day & age. To see this used on a home console is perfectly acceptable on a handheld, but not on a home system, and feels like a missed opportunity. What could have been a chance to fill out the main characters with a bit of humanity, only serves to add to the feeling of a sub-anime OTT text discussion, with the player soon finding the skip function very handy indeed. Dialogue is particularly cringe worthy, with some dubious moral lecturing in amongst some of the most ridiculous story ideas ever committed to silicon. Maybe in past generations this would have been forgiven, but it tests the player's patience a bit too far in places now.

Trauma Center Second Opinion feels like exactly what it is: a port of an existing game that should have stayed on its original platform. Lack of extra content once finished also leaves it feeling very lightweight.