Review:
Are You Alright? iPhone App Review

Have you ever played Trauma Center for the Wii, or happen to enjoy Sim-like games where you have to exercise your time management skills? If you said yes to either (or both) of these questions, Are You Alright? is the game for you.

The story for the game is rather simple: You are the daughter (but also a respected chief doctor in the ER) of a loony scientist father who has a knack for creating inventions (I’m waiting on seeing comments on the doctor’s appearance looking all too familiar to that of a famous evil doctor who too happened to invent, only death dealing robots instead) relating to the medical field. His inventions are rather stunning and ingenious; however no one knows how to use them. So, in order to gain your father some merit, you have to heal patients’ illnesses using these machines.

The image on the right shows exactly where the bulk of the game takes place. You are in a futuristic-looking hospital filled with your father’s contraptions. Patients will begin to pour in from the upper left hand corner, and you can see that they have a “heart” level. This indicates their level of health. As long as they’re waiting, they don’t lose much. But as soon as you drag them over to one of the booths, they’ll slowly lose health based on what kind of person they are (i.e. athletes will lose health slower than an average person).

You have several machines to choose between, ranging from a temperature gauging machine to an X-Ray station, to a bacteria collecting station. You’ll know where your patient needs to go based on the little box floating above their head. The goal is to heal them as quickly as possible, and get them out the door.

The game is a pure time management game, and as such starts off very slow, almost too easy, only to build up to a hectic pace. In between stages you can buy more machines to help speed the process up, technicians to help you in using the machines, or you can unlock microchips for use in your father’s “Brain Wave Therapy” machine. With this feature, you can rearrange microchips tetris style onto a square plate on the Brain Wave machine, and this machine will in turn effect every patient in your hospital. You can have patients retain their health for longer periods of time, or even gain more prestige.