If you’re super old school, you might remember Amateur Surgeon as Adult Swim’s very first game on the App Store. If you never played it, it’s basically Trauma Center: Under the Knife for the old school DS, but dripping with Adult swim charm and silliness. Amateur Surgeon was a hit, and Adult Swim went on to release two sequels to the original which all have since been removed from the App Store (although I’m not sure how many people noticed). As of this morning, Amateur Surgeon 4 (Free) hit the App Store. The fourth installment is a bit of a remaster of the original games, as well as being packed with new content, so there wasn’t a whole lot of reason to keep the old defunct Amateur Surgeon games around.
There’s 100 levels included now, which is way more content than the previous games, and it’s totally free to play. Also, apparently it’s pretty great on the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, which is rad as there’s really not many games that are made for that setup. We’re going to dig deeper into the game and see how the free to play stuff is handled, but knowing Adult Swim, I doubt it’s going to be very obnoxious at all.
If you’ve never played an Amateur Surgeon game, and have no idea what I’m talking about when I reference Trauma Center, be sure to give Amateur Surgeon 4 a shot, particularly for zero dollars.
And the update will reset all of your progress. I lost all my masks, money (some of which I paid for) and level bonuses. The coin doubler I purchased isn't activated and restoring purchases didn't fix it. I've lost six dollars and respect for this developer.
Yep I made the mistake of updating before checking too so all progress lost plus the game is a lot harder since I last played it, one example being less coins on one bonus level. Plus there's an energy timer on the new stage section, pure greed developer alert. Deleting game now!
If it's wiped my progress I'm deleting the app and never playing it again. After all the time I put in it's an insult to just wipe out a player's progress like that without warning.
I can't actually tell if it has wiped my progress of course, because it crashes on my iPad at the end of the tutorial level. Re-running the game just puts it back into the tutorial level and there's not even a pause button to escape it.
I guess they don't care about the existing players, they just rushed this out in time to cash in on all the people getting an iOS device for Christmas.
Hey SoL (great name by the way), check out the game's forums on TA, the devs have come some way in explaining the rationale behind the update. I agree that it's very unfair but they've promised they're taking steps to address the issues.
Yay an energy system!!!!! My favourite!...
The game is subscription based now. Or $30.00 to buy it non-subscription. Plenty of ads and IAP's still.