OFF TOPIC

I’m going to start this review with a disclaimer, I am old enough to remember the original Theme Hospital, on which this game is based. Two Point Hospital also shares some of the same developers as Theme Hospital. I bet you can’t guess where this is going.

Theme Hospital was a game developed by Bullfrog Productions, for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows compatible PCs back in 1997. The original game looked a little like this and has the same thematic design that you find in Two Point Hospital, including a dark sense of humour and hilarious sounding and looking diseases. By the way, if you’re interested Theme Hospital is available for free on Origin. That’s enough about Theme Hospital, let’s get on with the review proper. Two Point Hospital is a management simulation, the idea being to build up, staff and run your own hospital, usually, to make a profit. No this is definitely not an NHS model. There is a story mode and a sandbox mode. As you will come to expect if you have read any of my previous reviews, I will mainly be exploring the story mode, as I like a framework to work within, but I can see that Sandbox could become extremely addictive. So, you start with a completely blank slate and a small hospital, your first action is to place a reception desk and recruit a receptionist, and this is where the hilarity begins. Each member of staff that you hire has different characteristics, a little like Sims and their interactions change as you would expect. You can see that their recruitment fees change in direct correlation to the number of stars below their name, this all comes down to training, which we’ll cover a little later on.

Once the receptionist has been hired, we can then build a GP’s office, every single patient will need to visit a GP office, at least once during their stay. A GP’s office needs just three things to operate: a desk, computer and chair combo item, a filing cabinet and of course a GP. There are of course more things that you can add to increase the efficiency of the room, a medicine cabinet for example gives the room an extra 1% diagnosis and treatment power per cabinet, and there are some great tutorials out there that offer amazing tips on how best to layout your rooms for the best “yield”. So, now we have a receptionist and a GP. The next room the tutorial advises you to build is a pharmacy, this room requires a nurse and makes use of a drug mixer to help treat a variety of illnesses. Talking of illnesses, shall I take you through the types of illnesses and disorders that you will be researching and helping to treat? The game provides some wonderful posters that offer “prestige”, which is another metric used to measure your hospital. From left to right, we have Turtle Head, Shock Horror, Pandemic, Grey Anatomy, Lightheadedness, Jest Infection, Cubism, 8 Bitten, Animal Magnetism and Mock Star. Some of these require some hilarious equipment to help combat them. For example, for curing Pandemic, we have the Extractorpan, which does exactly what is sas on the tin. The De-Lux clinic will provide relief from those suffering with Lightheadedness, where patients present with a light bulb for a head. This results in a machine that unscrews the lightbulb and recreates the patient’s head and screws it back on.

Two Point Hospital not only features physical condition, but psychological ones too, this is one of my favourites, people turn up dressed like Freddie Mercury and are sent to a psychiatrist. Moving on from some of the hilarious ailments that you need to treat, let’s next take a look at the mechanics of staffing you hospital. We already know we need a Dr to act as a GP, there are other roles that they need to fill. You can train Drs to become world class psychiatrists, researchers, radiographers, geneticists, 55

Two Point Hospital not only features physical condition, but psychological ones too, this is one of my favourites, people turn up dressed like Freddie Mercury and are sent to a psychiatrist. Moving on from some of the hilarious ailments that you need to treat, let’s next take a look at the mechanics of staffing you hospital. We already know we need a Dr to act as a GP, there are other roles that they need to fill. You can train Drs to become world class psychiatrists, researchers, radiographers, genetisicts, diagnosticians, training specialists, surgeons and treatment specialists. Nurses can become ward heroes, training specialists, diagnosticians and treatment specialists. This is all completed using the training room, which offers a range of courses and a range of trainers, external and internal. The external trainer for psychiatrists is a chap called Herman Freud, who apparently owns the largest collection of bananas in the county! You can also train your staff to become trainers, to go and train your other staff. Training slots become available with experience. Once an employee has gathered enough experience on the job to be promoted, that opens a training slot. There are other, more general training courses available to both Drs and nurses like, bedside manner,. All of which have an impact on the way in which staff members go about their job. There are not only doctors and nurses, but an array of support staff in the guise of assistants and janitors, these roles also have their own specific training needs, assistants can learn the art of customer service and marketing. Janitors can learn the ghost capture skill, mechanics and maintenance. All staff also have more generalised courses available to them such as motivation, emotional intelligence and stamina training. Shall we move on to money next? That’s right, hospitals need to make money so your diagnostic and treatment options are not free. You have free reign to set the prices for these as you wish. But beware, the higher your prices, the lower your price reputation will be and the less patients you will see come through your doors.

There is an overview available so that you can see how your hospital is fairing financially. It looks a little like this.

As you can see, this particular hospital is well into the green. Shall we look and see how we are faring with our patients? This is the graph that shows your patient information and this is for the last 12 months. You can change the visible graph lines to see how each individual metric is doing.

Our charming guide, Albert Crank also has some information for us here. There is a lot of data available in the game to help you manage, or mismanage your hospital. But it is all really easy to find and interpret. This makes a refreshing change in the simulation management genre, where this information is often hidden away in some obscure place and you need a masters degree in economics to make sense of it.

There are similar graphs and the such like for staff, and an overview of how you are dealing with each individual ailment in the game. There is a huge amount of customisation available, if you want to use it, but there is also no penalty for not naming each and every patient or doctor who walks through your doors. And if you are having problems distinguishing between your ward nurses and your diagnosticians, there are cute outfit changes that you can make to make it a little easier. In short, this is an incredibly fun and addictive game. It can be incredibly challenging but also rewarding, especially having your in house trained research doctors come up with a cure for yet another weird and wonderful ailment. If you have a slightly dark sense of humour then the hospital announcer and radio presenters will provide hours of entertainment all on their own.

Written By The Simming Spoonie