The visual style is clean and almost restrained, though with thoughtful animation and a dedication to visual puns that suggest it was something of a labour of love. What makes the game sing is its atmosphere, which is a far cry from its cringeworthy marketing. The UI is wonderfully-designed, drawing your attention seamlessly to any impending crises, offering buckets of data to drill down into or ignore as you wish, and with a refined suite of quality of life features like room template saving and copy-pasting. What’s this mysterious new illness and what do we need to treat it? Oh…Įvery session of Two Point Hospital offers a buffet of addictive, I’ll-just-fix-this management challenges, nested within a generous and varied campaign. Best sell the research lab (just for now) and fire your researcher. Ah, but now you’re in debt again and your only surgeon is threatening to quit because his promotion hasn’t been matched by a salary rise. That’s okay, build an extinguisher and hire more janitors. Ah, but your janitors were busy cleaning up ectoplasm on the other side of the building and can’t maintain the machines now one is on fire. A horde of prematurely mummified patients descending but nowhere to treat them? No worries, take out a loan, throw up a couple of decrypters, hire some skilled nurses and get to it. Each of Two Point Hospital’s systems likewise offers an array of balanced options to juggle, and while the game will rarely punish you irrevocably for failure, disaster can spiral outward in fun and unpredictable ways. Call in an external tutor to take off some pressure, or learn a new skill, and you’ll need to cough up a quite chuck of change. To increase efficiency, you can train multiple staff in the same field, provided they all need to study the same course, but this will deplete your workforce more acutely. Training makes your staff more effective, for instance, and allows you to cultivate the specialist diagnosticians, psychiatrists, surgeons and radiologists needed to keep your machine operating efficiently in the latter levels, but also pulls both teacher and student out of the workforce for the duration of the class. So far, so realistic.Īdding nuance are detailed systems of interior design, training, research and upgradable equipment. But they, in turn, will demand wages, break rooms and even decent working conditions. This means you’ll need to employ assistants to keep patients happy, fed and watered, and janitors to scrub the decks. Patients will cr- ah, defaecate, vomit and die inconsiderately unless their needs are met, covering the hospital in filth and – more importantly – depriving you of the payouts associated with treatment. As both each level and the campaign progress, however, you’ll need to expand an array of diagnostics and specialised treatment rooms in order to keep financially afloat. At first, a few doctors and nurses can staff a handful of clinic rooms and a pharmacy to quash basic ailments. These sickly human cash machines will need to be filtered through a series of GP appointments and investigations before a diagnosis is made and treatment is delivered for big bucks. Patients will first trickle, then flood, into your hospital with an increasingly challenging array of ailments. Two Point Hospital offers a series of satisfying nested micro-challenges that add up to a supremely satisfying whole. But if, like me, you have the intellectual fortitude to overlook such superficial blemishes, how does Two Point Hospital fare as a management game? To top it all, the ECG trace on the logo isn’t accurate. The opening trailer features an American drawl and ker-azy antics at odds with the rest of the game’s humour. Then, opening up the game, it promptly spams you with Sega-branded ads for Sonic the Hedgehog© and the dev’s follow-up game. I am also one of the seemingly few millennials not to have played Theme Hospital in my youth, meaning I come to this unapologetically nostalgia-fueled management sim with a skeptical eye. The art style and atmosphere prominently displayed in its marketing materials feature a parade of gurning sub-Aardman plasticine figures and a Facebook feed’s worth of dad jokes a distinctly British kind of cringeworthy. I went into Two Point Hospital, frankly, with low expectations.
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