Two Point Hospital review by Rick Moscatello

[Doom]

[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]


Brilliant.



As I recover from perhaps my 40th treatment over 15 years for what the doctors endlessly assure me is an “easily curable” cancer, I had to have some interest in this game—I was hoping I would get to inflict some pain on the doctors for a change. No luck with that, but nevertheless what we have here is a good sim made all the better with a strong undercurrent of humor.

A good sim game needs options, lots and lots of options by which a player can explore a theme. Rollercoaster Tycoon is perhaps the ultimate game in this genre (it’s pretty cheap nowadays, just get it if you don’t have it already), but Two Point Hospital does a heck of great job of adding another option to the genre.


Another promotion, another opportunity for training.

There are only 4 types of employees for you to hire—doctors, nurses, assistants, and janitors. While this might seem meagre, there are dozens of skills (and levels within those skills) allowing you to specialize your employees. Doctors can become radiologists, diagnosticians, psychiatrists, researchers…many options, and while this decreases a bit for nurses, a bit more for assistants, and there are only three decent skills for janitors (maintenance, upgrading machine, and catching ghosts)…there’s enough here, and you can either hire or train to get the skills you want.



The game loosely plays as a series of hospitals which you open and get in good running order. There’s no sandbox mode, but it’s no great loss—you can improve and enhance your hospital forever after you’ve “finished” the scenario. While initially, your options are limited (a few diagnosis rooms and a pharmacy), you fairly quickly get more options granted you.


You don't normally zoom in, but if you do you're rewarded with great animations.

The patients, incidentally, don’t get horrific soul-crushing life and body-destroying diseases like cancer. Instead, they’re all pretty humorous, such as “light headed” where the patient’s head turns into a light bulb. The cure, amazingly enough, is to unscrew the bulb and put a head back on…there are many such illnesses, and the graphical displays of the patients being tortured while being treated are pretty humorous.

But wait, there’s more. Patients don’t just want diagnoses and cures, they also want to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and be entertained. Thus you (eventually) have many options for vending machines, bathrooms, magazine racks, gift shops, and such to try to keep them happy.

Certain hospitals are hot or cold, and so you’ll have to install radiators or air conditioners, and you should also consider beautifying the place with plants and other decorations. Hospitals also have a tendency towards certain ailments (more broken bones near the ski lodge), although you can influence this via marketing campaigns.

As you play, you’ll eventually fill up your hospital with various rooms, but you can buy adjacent lots for further expansion. Mercifully, it’s a simple matter to just pick up a whole room and move it around, so you needn’t stress too much about making sure all your initial placements are perfect.

Random quests also pop up, from visiting dignitaries to a sudden pan-demic (patients with pans stuck on their heads), requiring you to tweak what you’re doing (eg, adding more rose bushes, or extra pan-demic treatment rooms)…you generally don’t get to sit back and do nothing.

While the game is often great, there are some things which just don’t work for me. Patients (and employees) will often get angry and leave (or threaten to quit), due to being hungry, thirsty, bored, or needing to go to the bathroom…even when every building has bathrooms (no lines), cafeterias, vending machines and amusements. Patients often die, and come back as ghosts, terrifying everyone else until a janitor comes by to suck them up—even an advanced and well-run hospital just can’t seem to stop any of this from happening on a very regular basis.


It says I lost $6k, but my cash will drop $50k all the same...

Every month you get a finance report, giving income less expenses…but there are clearly some other factors involved, as I often found my hospital hemorrhaging money with no real means of determining what the problem is, even when my balance sheet is positive.

Bottom line, there’s an awesome sim game here, well worth the price of admission, and destined to become a famous game in the genre…but I’m still disappointed that there’s no way to hurt the doctors.

Overall rating: 91