Surgeon Simulator review: Entertainingly grisly iPad game

One key factor when evaluating PC and console games ported to iPad or iPhone is how well the controls have been adapted from keyboard, mouse and/or joypad to a touchscreen. But in this case that doesn’t really apply, because the controls in Surgeon Simulator are deliberately terrible.

Surgeon Simulator became a cult hit after being devised in a couple of days for Global Game Jam, and then being quickly polished up for commercial release. The whole thing is a single joke, essentially, but a rather good one: a life-or-death medical sim built around slapstick, ragdoll physics and cartoon graphics.

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You’re Nigel, a catastrophically clumsy surgeon, bumbling and fumbling your way through complex operations on a (frequently blood-spurting and bone-fragment-strewn) patient/victim named Bob. This clumsiness is imposed by the game’s controls, which are so inaccurate that you spend half the game knocking medical instruments on the floor and losing things in the chest cavity. There is a vast and seemingly universal humor to this.

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