Review:
House MD - The Game

There’s something about the idea of a medical game featuring House that’s just so appealing. Maybe it’s the chance to mess with other people’s lives and send people into tricky unnecessary surgeries or maybe it’s just the opportunity to call people rude names and get away with it because you’re always, always right.

Yeah, it’s the being rude to people.

So what we have here is a brand new game based on the TV series House MD. The medical team in the game is everyone you see on the TV series. (Excuding Kutner, placing the game somewhere in the middle of season 6, for all you geek fans out there.)

The game concept is simple enough and does follow the formula for the tv show…

Someone collapses with some sort of sudden illness, nobody else can figure it out so he/she/it gets shipped to the department of diagnostic medicine at Princeton Plainsborough hospital under the care of Dr Gregory House. House and his team then get on with mis-diagnosing, mis-medicating and mis-appropriating hospital resources gradually making the patient worse to a point of near death before House has an epiphany, discovers the real disease, gives the patient a ridiculously easy drug which fixes all the problems, calls them a rude name and then saunters back to his office where he has a moment of introspection and comments on his boss’ boobs.

And that’s what the game does, including the obligatory breaking-into-the-patients-home and the cheap shots at each of the cast.

So does it work as a game?

Well, yes and no.

It’s not so much one game as it is a series of minigames split apart by huge great sections of talking. There’s a grabbing minigame for blood analysis, one for operating the diagnostic machines, a wordy minigame for the diagnosis consults, the medical procedures are like a cross between playing ‘Trauma Center’ and any of the ‘CSI’ games, the site visits are like playing any of the Hidden Object games of which you’ll find a million online and (I kid you not) there’s even a breakout-style game where you bounce a ball around inside House’s brain so he can reach an epiphany.