Being up to your elbows in blood and gore as incoming rounds clatter overhead, and your injured squad mates scream out for first aid sounds more like an excerpt from a Medal of Honor citation, rather than the premise of a new video game.
But that’s exactly the idea behind Medic: Pacific Corpsman, a new game for PC coming out next year on Steam.
In Medic: Pacific Corpsman you play as an unarmed medic fighting in the Pacific Campaign of World War II — part of a genre of war games that are so realistic, you should get a DD-214 if you actually play it through to completion.
Unlike other military games, which tend to focus on killing as many enemy soldiers as possible, in Pacific Corpsman your job is to save lives. You’ll have to sprint through fire to the wounded, drag them to cover, and then render aid. And it looks like it’ll be up to the player to triage the wounded and determine how best to patch them up.
Created by Hypnotic Ants, Games Operators, and PlayWay S.A., the PC game is still in development, so there’s a chance some of the rougher edges seen in the trailer will be smoothed out when it debuts sometime in 2021.
While not much is known about the game’s storyline, the trailer suggests that some missions will be modeled after actual battles, and may include references to real-life soldiers.
For example, at one point in the promo clip, you hear the medic repeat “Lord, help me get one more” as he rushes to render aid to the wounded. That’s the same mantra that Medal of Honor recipient and Army medic Desmond Doss repeated at Hacksaw Ridge during the Battle of Okinawa, where he was credited with single-handedly saving the lives of as many as 75 men.
Now, Pacific Corpsman may not be the kind of game you sit down and play after work as a way to unwind; I don’t know about you, but having to choose between treating one soldier at the risk of losing another doesn’t sound relaxing.
However, it’s sure to be something different from all the frenetic spray-and-pray shooters out there, and that alone makes me want to give Medic: Pacific Corpsman a chance when it comes out.