House, M.D. is a budget title based on the television series of the same name. In it, you guide House and his team of diagnosticians through five cases, including curing a chef with blue skin and a gymnast with excessive bruising. The game follows the same format as the television show, and so you spend most of your time interviewing patients and family members, checking the patient for symptoms, brainstorming ideas at the whiteboard, breaking into the patient's house to search for clues, running all sorts of diagnostic tests, and, after about five wrong diagnoses, suddenly coming up with a cure that makes everybody happy.

All of the activities in the game are handled with minigames. For example, when you're trying to come up with possible diseases at the whiteboard, the game gives you something like "------- ---" and then slowly reveals letters while possible answers float around on the screen. Your goal then is to click on the right answer as quickly and accurately as possible. Each minigame is graded, and then at the end of the case you also get an overall grade.

Unfortunately, while some of the minigames strive to be realistic (I can now draw blood in my sleep) and others attempt to be actual games, none of them are fun, and most of them are repetitive and tedious. For example, in every case you have to analyze blood, which involves operating a machine filled with valves and spinning gizmos, but at every step of the process you're told exactly what to do, and so there's no challenge to the procedure, and no sense of accomplishment when you're done. In fact, I don't think there's any way to fail any of the minigames (the worst grade I got was a C), and games you can't lose seem sort of pointless.

Of course, the minigames are only half of the battle. The other half involves the cases themselves. Are they compelling? Are they well-written? Do they give House an opportunity to do something crazy? Unfortunately again, the game only gets the cases about half right. As far as I can tell (with no medical background whatsoever), the cases are all medically sound, and they provide enough twists and turns so it takes you an hour to solve them. But the problem is the dialogue. Whoever wrote the script for some reason decided that every line from House had to be a one-liner or an insult, and so House comes across as a petulant fourth grader instead of the curmudgeonly but (mostly) lovable doctor that he's supposed to be. It doesn't help that there isn't any voice acting in the game. Perhaps if Hugh Laurie had been able to voice House's lines, they would have come across better (but I doubt it).

And so House, M.D. isn't a game with much to offer. The cartoon style it uses for its graphics works well enough, but the game isn't fun to play, it isn't fun to watch, and it only takes a few hours to complete. If you're a die-hard fanatic of the series, then perhaps you'll find the game worthwhile enough, but for most people I'd recommend that you skip it.

Ratings:
[20/40] Gameplay
[11/15] Graphics
[09/15] Sound
[08/10] Interface
[06/10] Writing
[04/05] Technical
[04/05] Documentation