Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator

Written by Jason Dailey on 2/11/2025 for PS5  

In my time writing for Gaming Nexus, I’ve taken up the mantle of our resident “simulator guy”, which is a badge that I wear proudly in support of the niche subgenre of video games. However, that doesn’t mean that I enjoy every simulator that comes out, and some never tickle my fancy at all. I’m a simulator player that enjoys broad looks at entire professions – first responders or construction workers, for example. In fact, it was my adoration for developer Aesir Interactive’s last game (Police Simulator: Patrol Officers) that led me to its new game – Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator. After performing triage on Ambulance Life, I’m sad to say it’s one of those simulators that didn’t quite resonate with me.

Ambulance Life is not a bad game, but I’m discovering more and more that I’m a bit of a simulator snob with a very particular taste – I prefer hands-on, dynamic simulators with a decent number of moving parts. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is a great example of that, which is also the reason for my disappointment with Ambulance Life, considering that both come from the same developer. But to be fair, every profession is vastly different, and some are more easily translated to video games than others.

Structurally, Ambulance Life is like Police Simulator in that you work shifts ranging from 15 to 45-minutes long, responding to a variety of callouts within that allotted time. Completing shifts earns XP that unlocks more patient ailments, more tools of the trade to treat them with, and additional districts in the fictional city of San Pelicano. Ambulance Life features two difficulties available from the beginning – Classic, which holds your hand a bit, and Simulation, which certainly does not.

San Pelicano’s residents fall victim to all manner of ailments, including panic attacks, bike accidents, gun shots, overdoses, and structure fires, among many others. After arriving on scene, you question patients and witnesses – a process known as Anamnesis within the profession – to help discover just what exactly is going on with them. It’s often obvious what is wrong, as it’s hard to miss the blood-spurting gash on someone’s leg, or the big sparking electrical panel five feet away, but you still must do your due diligence. And if there are multiple patients, you will need to triage them to determine which one has the greatest need for medical attention. This is done by holding the left trigger to study the various parts of their body for any injuries. From there, you will get them into the back of your ambulance and begin administering care. A tablet computer contains all the information on various symptoms and conditions, as well as how to treat them. To provide proper care, you must match the patient's symptoms to a condition in the tablet, which will then suggest a course of treatment. I found this process to be a bit finnicky, even after a day one patch. At times it told me to administer a medication that I did not have access to yet, or it only let me view the neurological ailment category when I clearly had a burn victim writhing in pain in the back of my ambulance.

When and if you can nail down the proper diagnosis, you begin the process of stabilizing the patient by completing multiple tasks. A lot of these tasks are minigames, which initially I was fond of, but grew stale the more I played. Having such a huge chunk of Ambulance Life’s gameplay be simply minigames felt somewhat antithetical to the genre. For example, wrapping a bandage around a patient triggers a minigame where you guide a cursor along a line, pressing face buttons within certain timing windows until you reach the end. Successfully completing the game will initiate the animation of wrapping the bandage around the patient. Starting an IV to directly inject medications into a patient’s veins is a sliding bar timing minigame that wants you to press a button within an indicated range, which will then show the animation for inserting the IV. I think I understand why the developer did it – it’s probably much easier to create a minigame rather than an entire sequence of mechanics. For a genre with a reputation for buggy or downright broken gameplay, perhaps it eliminated some potential pitfalls of having too many things that could break. I’m speculating, of course, but my point is that, whenever practically possible, let me do the work myself in a simulator. I would much rather be able to wrap the bandage on my own by, say, rotating the analogue stick, or likewise, I’d rather guide the needle into the vein with a stick and/or triggers. It’s easy for me to sit here and play Monday Morning Quarterback, but to some extent, Ambulance Life is death by a thousand minigames. It’s not that the gameplay isn’t good, it’s just not as interesting as it could, or perhaps, should be.

Once you’ve stabilized a patient, it is then time to transport them to the closest hospital. Along the way, their condition can sometimes change, requiring you to direct your partner paramedic on what to do. Sometimes it is as simple as adjusting the temperature in the ambulance because the patient gets hot or cold, but other times it is far more serious than that. I mistakenly had my co-paramedic administer CPR once because a lady looked unresponsive when we got her in the ambulance. When her blood pressure and heart rate bottomed out, I told my partner to start CPR, but apparently that wasn’t necessary, which is why I don’t need to be a real-life paramedic.

In addition to the standard shifts of varying lengths, there is also a catastrophic event that unlocks within each district. These are mass casualty events that will test your skills as a paramedic, and a nice change of pace from the usual shifts. The game turns up the pressure by adding a time limit to the triage phase, which means you must locate and properly diagnose each patient as fast as possible. There can be more than a dozen patients needing care during catastrophic events, though not all are in critical condition, and some are even dead-on-arrival. Triaged patients get one of four tags – green, yellow, red, or black – rising in severity from green to black (dead). You’ll then set up a field hospital and administer care to select a few patients, before picking the worst one to transport to the hospital. At the end of each event, as well as each normal shift, you will get a scorecard that somewhat breaks down your performance, though it does not give details on which patients you correctly or incorrectly triaged, which makes it difficult to learn from your mistakes.

Back on the road, driving feels fine and is made a bit better on PS5 with some DualSense support for adaptive triggers that add a feeling of weight to the vehicle. The siren and lights also flash on the controller, which is a neat little touch. Performance-wise, Ambulance Life runs surprisingly great. In fact, it is one of the best-optimized simulators out of the gate that I have experienced, which again, is not typically a hallmark of the genre. I do have to also gripe about the fact that there is no cockpit or interior camera inside the ambulance, which is strange for a simulator called Ambulance Life. Let me be completely immersed, for crying out loud!

Taken as a whole, Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is a decent, albeit safe attempt at a paramedic simulator. For a simulator, it runs incredibly well, but that optimized performance feels like it comes at the cost of more intricate gameplay. The result is a game that feels painfully average and fails to truly immerse you in the paramedic profession. It could be much worse, but it could also be so much better. With that said, simulators, perhaps more than any other, is very much a “different strokes for different folks” genre, meaning that if you are cool with minigames galore, this is a more than serviceable paramedic sim.