Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator Review (Xbox Series X)

STAFF REVIEW of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator (Xbox Series X)

Friday, March 21, 2025.
by Adam Dileva

Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator Box art

There’s seemingly a simulator game for nearly any hobby or profession these days. The latest, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator, puts you in the shoes of a paramedic, saving lives of those that need it when 911 is called. While not hyper realistic in all aspects of the demanding job, it will give you a sense of the urgency and importance as you rush in your ambulance from call to call, or help survivors of a massive catastrophic event.

You start your Paramedic career by choosing the avatar you want to use from a handful of premade characters. Sadly there’s no avatar creator, so you’ll have to unfortunately stick with one of the terrible looking default models, none of which I particularly enjoyed or wanted to be. None looked as though they had any personality or emotions. You’ll then choose between Classic or Simulation mode, where Classic holds your hand a bit more, telling you steps to take, whereas Simulation leaves you on your own.

While there’s no typical Career mode, you’re simply playing different lengths of shifts after the first few tutorial levels. You’ll hop in your ambulance, get a call from dispatch of where a patient needs help, rush to the scene through braindead traffic and pedestrians, helping the patient as much as possible before loading them onto a stretcher and finally returning them to the local hospital before heading to the next call.

There’s no overarching storyline, just playing timed shifts, eventually unlocking special Catastrophic events which I would classify as a ‘boss’ level of sorts. You’ll have to adapt and figure out the best course of action for each call and patient, making the right decisions while also being quick and efficient to increase their chance of survival. Shifts will last anywhere from 15 to 45 real minutes, and the more calls you complete the more XP you’ll earn.

Being the latest paramedic hire for the city of San Pelicano, you’ll take your years of training to the streets, driving an ambulance and saving as many lives as possible. You’ll begin in the central part of the city, eventually unlocking two more districts as you progress, adding different backdrops and unique hazards for the accident-prone citizens.

Once you’re given a call you’re not able to refuse or cancel it, but you’re not forced to drive there right away in the open city either. The longer you take to arrive though, the worse the patent will start to deteriorate. So hop in your ambulance, mark the spot on your map to set your GPS and turn on those sirens. Now get ready to experience how brain dead the traffic is, as you’ll be lucky if they opt to get out of your way. Now granted, drivers are this dumb in real life too, but I don’t believe this was intentional. You’re going to have to get creative jumping the curbs, driving on the wrong side of the road, and avoiding pedestrians that clearly have no sense of urgency.

Patient’s injuries will vary from confusion, sickness, cuts, bruises, burns, panic attacks, gun shots and more. Once you interview the patient by asking some standard questions and then give them a glance over by focusing on different body parts, you can then use your tablet to assess their condition. Choose the correct category and subcategory and it’ll give you a list of the steps you should take to stabilize them.

Don’t expect the patients to tell you much that will help though, and also don’t expect them to act in any realistic way. I had a person with third degree burns, boils on her leg, and she was talking to me normally; no screams, no panic, just terrible monotone acting with zero emotion. Even though there’s sometimes witnesses hanging out, they are just as useless and won’t really give you any information other than “I don’t know”. Even police that are hanging at the scene waiting for you are useless and don’t have any information either.

If there’s more than one injured person at a scene, you’ll assess them all, then choose who is in more critical condition and transport them to the hospital, leaving the others to fend for themselves or die I guess since there’s no calls for backup or room for a second patient. First you’ll need to get your stretcher out of the back of the ambulance, then awkwardly push it towards the patient before getting them strapped up. Moving them on the stretcher is a pain with awkward controls, and don’t even think about walking backwards, cause the camera will automatically rotate and then mess up the movement. Once you get them to the back of the ambulance you can them load them and go inside the side door to start administering medical help to stabilize them before the trip back to the hospital.

This is where you’ll start to be able to hopefully help your patient, first starting off by checking their vitals with different equipment, attaching an IV or an oxygen mask if needed. Certain equipment has a quick minigame to complete first, like tracing a line to place a bandage, or stopping a moving meter at just the right spot. These are tedious and don’t really add much to the gameplay, but thankfully they can be completely toggled off in the options. There are some weird bugs though, like when I placed a blood pressure cuff on a patient before wrapping their burn in a bandage. Apparently that cuff is permanently on and unable to be taken off, so I couldn't treat the burn. There are a number of different patient complaints and a handful of medical instruments you’ll unlock as you progress and earn XP for each successful shift. There’s also an option to toggle nudity or not, as you’ll have to undress some patients to perform on them.

Oddly enough, even though you’re the paramedic, you’re the designated driver as well. You stabilize the patient as best as you can then have to drive them to the hospital. This is all while your partner does absolutely nothing aside from give a couple words about the patient’s status or your poor driving. Even though you have a partner, don’t expect them to do anything, though I’m sure we’ve all worked with someone like that at some point.

At certain levels you’ll unlock different Major Catastrophes for the district you’re in. These are major casualty events that will put your paramedic training to the test. The first is a collapsed bridge that lands near a gas station. There’s a number of patients throughout the area, so you need to find all the hurt people you can, quickly assess them, then again, decide who’s the one lucky patient you’re going to decide to save. You can’t save everyone, and only one will be lucky enough to be transported to the hospital, so you’ll have to decide who’s in the direst need of treatment.

The facial animations when talking to patients is poorly done and doesn’t match the severity of their alleged condition, which matches the terrible voice acting. There are zero emotions, no crying or screaming for someone with major injuries, and they all basically say the same thing, regardless of their condition. There’s also a number of minor bugs that annoyed, like cables going haywire, or the shade under a bridge causing complete darkness, even though it was quite bright outside nearby. GPS also took me to the wrong path more than once, not knowing the patient was under said bridge, causing me to turn back around and lose time to get to them.

There’s always some design decisions that have to be made when balancing fun gameplay versus pure realism. When simulator is in the name though, you generally expect it to be as realistic as possible, regardless of how mundane or tedious certain aspects may be, as simulating said job is the goal. Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator gives an insight into the life of a paramedic, but there’s certainly a lot of design choices that were made for ‘gameplay’ over realism.

**Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 4.7 / 10
Gameplay: 5.0 / 10
Visuals: 6.0 / 10
Sound: 3.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator (Xbox Series X)

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