Manic Medic
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| Manic Medic

There's definitely a new genre afoot in the world of casual games, although for want of a catchy name, I'll have to refer to it as the 'Harrassed Professionals Run Around Trying To Keep Customers Happy' genre.

Diner Dash was the first game of this kind, with you playing a waitress trying to seat customers, take their orders, feed them and clean up. It was great. Now it's been joined by Manic Medic, which is basically the same thing, but set in a hospital with doctors.

The aim is to assign patients to bed, diagnose them, treat them and then clear up their dirty blankets. And there are more games of this sort on the way, trust me. It can only be a matter of time before someone releases Brothel Blitz, where you have to... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Anyway, back to Manic Medic. The core gameplay is simple. Hospital beds are assigned number keys: '1', '3', '4', '6', '7' and '9'. When patients appear at the entrance to your ward, you press '0' to select them, then a number to assign them to a bed.

Press the bed number again to diagnose them, then press '*' to go to the care table to pick up an item to heal them, although you can also press '#' to pick up a comfort item to cheer them up (I think this may mean Good Drugs). Finally, when they leave, you press the bed number again to pick up their sheet, and then press '2' to drop it in the laundry hamper.

Simple, right? Initially, yes, but try co-ordinating all that with four patients at once. This is the challenge of Manic Medic, and presumably the real-life NHS too. When the ward is full, it makes your life a blur of rushing from bed to bed, although it also offers the chance to bag bonus points through combos.

Combos? Yep, this is when you do the same action several times in a row. For example, you get a diagnosis combo by visiting the beds of several patients in a row to diagnose them, while a clean-up combo happens when you, yes, clean up after several patients in a row.

The same applies for final healing of patients, while you can even get a Same Patient combo for assigning people to beds previously occupied by a similar-looking patient. Combos aren't just a way to get extra points in Manic Medic: they're essential to progress.

While it will win few marks for originality, the game plays very well. The controls are made for mobile, and the bitty nature of the gameplay suits dipping in and out.

Depth is provided by the scoring system, which gives you bronze, silver and gold medals for each level depending on how well you do, and also by the addition of bonus items as you progress through the game, such as beds that allow you to keep the patient in them permanently happy, or ensure they don't die.

There is a downside. The beds are a bit squeezed in, which made us struggle sometimes to work out which icon was related to which patient. You do get used to it, but for a while it was enough to throw the gameplay into chaos, as we wandered around clutching the wrong items without realising we hadn't got rid of them.

While we'd definitely recommend Diner Dash as your introduction to the HPRATTKCH genre (and yes, we're working on the name), Manic Medic is a suitably chaotic attempt to bring the world of doctors and nurses to your phone.

Manic Medic

Manic Medic doesn't quite live up to its inspirations, but it's a fun title that'll test your reactions to the max
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Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)