I
t’s tough being a surgeon,
doubly so if your operating
table is a ramshackle tent in
the middle of a warzone. I know
this because I’ve just been saving
lives (and violently ending them) in
the rather bluntly titledFixin’ To
Die. It’s a hectic doctoring sim that
presents your harried little surgeon
dude with a procession of wounded
soldiers, each with grievous injuries
that will kill them if they’re not
treated in time.
As with NHS hospitals in the UK,
there are onlysomany beds – in this
case just two – so in each stage there
will be a queue of patients waiting
desperately for the healing touch of
your, um, hacksaw. You begin the
caring process by heaving a patient
onto your shoulder and carrying
them over to an available sickbed,
where their condition will
immediately stabilise.
Once ensconced in a bed, their
survival odds will become known to
you – be it an inspiring 88%, or a
worrying 12% chance that your
surgery attempts will end in success.
Rather than wasting precious
hacksaw time on a dead man – and
thus making everyone in the queue
sicker – you can choose to sacrifice
the, frankly doomed, patient instead,
shoving their body into a big disposal
bin. The downside of this horrific
action is that you might not meet
your quota, but on the plus side you
will free up a bed – and can even use
their blood toimproveanother
patient’s odds.
It’s quite tasteless, but the
animation and sound effects are
terrifically, ludicrously over-the-top.
And beneath all that, this is a novel
management title that
builds on games likeDiner
Dash, with a hacksaw and
geysers of blood.71
HIPPOCRATIC NOPE
Save and end lives in FIXIN’ TO DIE. By Tom Sykes
EXPECT TO PAY
NothingDEVELOPER
SeaDadsLINK
http://www.bit.ly/fixintodieNEED TO KNOW
I
t was a good five minutes
before I saw through the sci-fi
veneer of Galactic Center for
Etymological Research, and I
realised it was actually a relatively
simple word game. This is, after all,
a game by Stephen Lavelle, the
creator of fiendish meat-based
puzzler Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I
wasn’t expecting its systems to feel
so familiarly newspapery. At its
core it’s the sort of puzzler you’d
find in your daily paper’s games
section, next to the sudoku.
While Galactic Center is nominally a
game of space exploration, where
you’ll travel from sector to sector,
charting planets and managing your
fuel reserves, what you’re really doing
is shuffling letters around to conjure
up new words. The ‘fuel’ thing is just
a turn limit, throwing up a cute
failure message after a certain
number of wasted moves.
You begin on the planet Star, but
by swapping the S and T around, you
discover the planet Tsar. And so on
and so on, until you’ve located every
possible planet in a solar system, and
you’re warped to an even more
challenging lexicographical
environment. While Galactic Center
starts simply, offering basic words
that are easy to contort into new
ones, it balloons in complexity. Even
the addition of an extra letter is a big
step up in difficulty.
A solid puzzle game is what this
is, artfully made and expertly paced,
and with an appealing space
exploration layer drizzled over the
top. It’s not the next great
puzzler, but it will make
your brain happy for an
afternoon or two.75
INTERGALACTIC
Word up withGALACTIC CENTER FOR
ETYMOLOGICAL RESEARCH. By Tom Sykes
EXPECT TO PAY
NothingDEVELOPER
Stephen LavelleLINK
http://www.bit.ly/spellspaceNEED TO KNOW
Run out of fuel and this space
truck will recover you.Fuel upgrades just give you
more rope to hang yourself with.Yes, please treat me on that
gore-soaked bed.Fixin’ to Die / Galactic Center for Etymological Research
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