Grey's Anatomy

If we were going to be hospitalised for any amount of time, we'd want it to be at Seattle Grace Hospital. The fictional location of TV series Grey's Anatomy is packed with enough beautiful doctors and nurses to keep anyone's heart beating, and all of them have enough drama in their lives to ensure you'd never have to tune into a single hour of hospital radio. Besides, none of the action seems to involve MRSA either, which is always a bonus.

Grey's Anatomy the mobile game follows Gameloft's obsession with other TV series games, including Heroes, Desperate Housewives and Lost – all of which have been converted in a largely enjoyable form, and this doesn't buck the trend. Playing like a cross between The Sims and DS surgery game Trauma Center, Grey's Anatomy is challenging, likeable and lengthy.

The game begins with lead character Meredith Grey getting ready for her first day at work having spent the night with the handsome Dr Derek Shepherd. Hence your first task is to navigate her flat looking for a bra against a time limit – this isn't a game which shies away from adult themes. It's a trend that's reaffirmed when you're slicing aneurysms out of a patient's brain. But, for now, just find some upper body support and head off to the main location in the game, which is, of course, the hospital.

Playing as an intern doctor, your main goal as Meredith is to increase your ranking to more senior levels. The experience points needed are gained in varying manner: you get some for finding hidden items around the hospital, but the majority are earned by carrying out operations and other procedures.

These in turn are distributed in several ways. Grey's Anatomy is largely a free-roaming game that lets you explore, talk to patients and pick up side-missions in whichever order you like, but when your pager goes off you must run to the appropriate room to deal with whichever emergency has cropped up.

If there are no emergencies, popping into the operating room usually results in being allocated patients to clean up, or you can go to surgery and assist doctors with bigger operations, such as removing brain tumours. There's quite a range of operations and treatments to master.

The actual operations play differently to the rest of the game and are decidedly trickier, too. Luckily you get unlimited stabs (sorry) at them, although if your energy runs low you'll need to go and seek a coffee or snack machine. Oh, we should also mention the patient's vitals, which are shown in a bar at the top of the screen and these drop if you let a wound bleed for too long or make too many mistakes.

Back on the operating table, moving an onscreen cursor selects different surgical tools such as the scalpel and the drain from the bottom of the screen, which you then use in the appropriate way. So pieces of glass need to be plucked out with the tweezers, while tumours are cut out with the scalpel, then everything is stitched up.

Each implement also requires a different control method, so to stitch up a wound you need to stop a series of circles when they're green, while to drain a wound you repeatedly tap the '5' button. It's an effective method, although slightly inaccurate at times.

But for the most part, Grey's Anatomy is incredibly accomplished. The game is divided into chapters, each of which ends once you've reached the required rank. There are cut-scenes between key characters, which should keep fans of the TV series happy, and a range of skills to master (such as navigating stretchers around wards and running flat out along corridors without slipping over).

Our only criticisms are of the moments you have to keep performing an operation in order to get the points to ascend a rank, which can get a bit repetitive. And while the loading screens between areas are obviously required, they're annoying when you've just accidentally stepped the wrong way and need to wait ten seconds to go back.

These aside, though, Grey's Anatomy is both entertaining and diverse. Not only is Seattle Grace the hospital you'd want to be sent to in real life, even in the case of the game we'd suggest you pay good money to go.