Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Doctor Stiles, paging Doctor Stiles, please report to the ER immediately for emergency surgery. That's right; Dr. Stiles and Nurse Angie are back in all new surgical adventure for the DS. After exploring the home console frontier on Wii, Atlus is bringing the series back to its roots on the DS -- where it has always seemed better suited. The medical world is once again in turmoil as bioterrorism strikes civilian lives and infects them with deadly viruses. The only way to save the patients is with the unequal guidance of the incredibly hot Nurse Angie and the unparalleled surgery techniques of Dr. Stiles. Scrub up, because it's surgery time.

What's Hot
Most people who are going to go out and pickup Trauma Center aren't picking it up for the shear enjoyment of performing surgery on patients. They are playing this game for the unique gameplay and addicting aspects of it. Much like its predecessor, Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 does just that, but with minor new additions, like the defibrillator for example. Fans of the series will feel right at home when they start off and won't look back. Luckily, Atlus has kept us veterans in mind when developing this new installment. Instead of wasting a lot of time with tutorial based missions at the start of the game, Atlus limits it to the first few missions, so those of us who already have our scalpels dirty can dive right into the new patient and slice away.

Back again are the challenging missions. Even though the game does offer several difficulty settings for each surgery, you will feel that Easy is a little too easy and Normal is just right -- well, most of the time at least. Newcomers will definitely want to try their hand at the Easy setting first, just so you can get the basic understanding of the fundamental design of the game and how things are going to workout. For us more skilled surgeons, Easy will come off as incredibly easy and won't offer the challenge we have become accustomed to over the years. This is when Normal comes into play. While, it may start off as moderately difficult, the game kicks it up a notch in the later surgeries and you'll quickly find yourself retrying missions several times before finding success. The challenges can come off as problematic at times, but with each surgery only lasting a few minutes at a time, it's not a major concern. Honestly, you know you are going to intercept some surgeries that will just appear impossible at times, and that's one of the main appeals of the game. Surgeries will range from removing glass, fighting tumors, or the always troublesome GUILT, which makes its way back in a more frightening form.

Like life, pinpoint precision plays a key role throughout the game, and, thankfully, the touchscreen control is flawless. Never during gameplay could I blame the game for a mistake. Every mistake was by my own hand and this makes the experience all that much more intense. While, it may be easy to blame the game for you messing up a surgery and accidentally killing your patient, you really can't find a fault when playing this game. The controls are perfect.

Aside from a great gameplay experience and pinpoint controls, Atlus has included more detailed graphics and voice acting. Graphically, the game won't induce vomiting from ultra realistic organs or any other bodily fluids, but the graphics do feature more medical details. Instead of staring at gray blotches and disfigured shapes that are supposed to represent a lung, you are now greeted by properly detailed organs and color. To make the experience feel even more like ER, voice acting has been implanted as well. The voice acting doesn't take place throughout the entire game; it's only used during key story developments. This is nice, especially when the game is so text heavy.

What's Not
Now, that's not to say the surgery finished without any complications. The game does suffer from two critical problems. Much like ER, the game suffers from long, boring, and overly dramatic dialogue. Many of the episodes found in the game consist of no actual surgeries; instead they are plot devices that just drag out for extended periods of time. Sure, you can skip these if you really don't care about the story, but then you miss out on some of the experience. Also back are the cheesy phrases like, "Don't worry, I'm a Doctor." Yeah…my mind would be at ease if my doctor told me that. While, it may not hurt the total experience, it doesn't make it feel anymore immersive.

The second life threatening virus is the lack of variety. The game features over 30 surgical episodes, but they lack variety. You will often feel like you are performing the same surgeries several times within the game, but with random inclusions just to mix things up a little. You can only remove a shard of glass from a patient so many times before it begins to feel repetitive. Had the game introduced some new gameplay elements to the formula, it could have benefited greatly.

Final Word
Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 is a welcome addition to the series. Sadly, it doesn't introduce any real new gameplay ideas and elements. Fans of the series will want to try this new installment and will thoroughly enjoy it, but may notice that stagnant feel of the series beginning to grow. If Atlus decides to bring out a Trauma Center 3, I hope they have some new ideas to bring to the series because it needs them. As of now, this is the best handheld surgical game and will keep you occupied for quite a while. I just hope Atlus is able to rejuvenate the next installment before the series enters into rigor mortis.