Home / Features /Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator – A career change you won’t stick with ByKim Snaith 6 February 20256 February 2025
I’ve never fancied being a paramedic, but Aesir Interactive’s latest simulator game promises a taste of the career path without so much as getting a splash of blood on your sleeve. I’m a sucker for a sim, and so I couldn’t pass up trying Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator. After a short stint with the game, however, it’s safe to say my ambitions haven’t changed. I won’t be signing up to retrain as a paramedic any time soon.
I suppose the most important thing that Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator has taught me is that running over a pedestrian while behind the wheel will not be tolerated. Yes, it’s common sense, really, but personally, I’ve always thought that if you are going to get run over, being hit by an ambulance is probably the best case scenario. After all, you’ve got immediate medical attention right there. Not in Ambulance Life. Forget about pulling up and administering medical attention to you own victim: it’s an instant game over for you, and back to your last checkpoint you go.
The problem is that, as ridiculous as it sounds, it’s not all that easy to not hit pedestrians. Sometimes you need to turn into a little side street and maybe it’s absolutely snided with people walking here, there and everywhere. You’d think that if an ambulance, blues-and-twos going at full volume, was turning into a road you wanted to cross, you’d simply stay put. But no: these hapless pedestrians of Ambulance Life seem to lose all sense and immediately panic when they see your ambulance appear.
They’ll run in all directions, often straight in front of you and, given the default third-person, out-of-vehicle viewpoint while you’re driving, you won’t be able to see the blighters. And well, that’s exactly how I ran one over. Sorry-not sorry: they deserved it for their absolute obliviousness to the Highway Code.
The haplessness of pedestrians pretty much sums up all of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Life to a tee. While it’s not completely terrible, it is janky through-and-through. Character models aren’t awful, but they aren’t quite right either, and the way they talk to you without attempting to look at you is unsettling to say the least. Pulling out a stretcher and trying to manoeuvre it feels a little like a Monty Python outtake and administering treatment to a patient is fiddly and clunky to say the least.
At least you can administer treatment to a patient. There’s a bit of a puzzle to treating each emergency you’re called out for: you’ll first need to ask some questions or observe the surroundings to work out what’s happened. Maybe it’s a road traffic accident, or maybe someone’s just had a funny turn while at work. There’s the whole gamut of emergencies to deal with, from profuse bleeding to a bit of a headache, and you’ll need to ask the right questions and do the correct preliminary checks before carting your patient off into the back of your ambulance.
If you’ve played Aesir Interactive’s previous game, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers, you’ll have some idea of how the format of the game works. You choose what type of shift you want to play, then get to it. You can choose the length of your shift, too, which will dictate how many emergencies you’ll deal with in one run. It’s very formulaic, although while I quite enjoyed Police Simulator, I can’t quite get into Ambulance Life in the same way.
Perhaps it’s because, as you’re treating a patient and trying to work out what’s wrong with them, it seems like everything is just handed to you on a plate. My to-do list told me exactly what medication to give someone and what procedures to carry out. It’s all just about ticking items off a list rather than figuring things out for myself. Granted, I have zero medical training so I’d have no idea what medicine might calm down a panicking RTA victim. But a bit of guidance rather than being told exactly what to do might go down better.
This comes with a caveat: my time with Ambulance Life: Paramedic Simulator has been very short so there’s a good chance that, further down the line, those to-do lists disappear and I’m given more responsibility. The problem is, it’s just not good enough to keep me playing to find out. It’s almost a shame, too, because bigger, high-stakes emergencies sound rather exciting — but given the jankiness of the earlier missions, I have a feeling they’ll be a stress-induced nightmare (and not for the right reasons).
Ambulance Life is not a terrible game by any means, but it’s not a good one, either. If you’re curious about what life as a paramedic is like, you might want to give this a try — but I don’t think it’ll give you much of a taste of reality. Just remember the one golden rule: don’t run anyone over.
Ambulance Life: Paramedic Simulator is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
