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In: Game Review
9 Jun 2007Many Tycoon games have allowed gamers to manage everything from railroads, theme parks to cruise ships and even prisons. Latest Tycoon game is Hospital Tycoon published by Codemasters. There already was a hospital management game (Theme Hospital, created by Bullfrog in 1997): now 10 years later, can another hospital simulation do better?
Unfortunately this game isn’t as good as Theme Hospital. Both games are very similar: you’re the general manager of a hospital and you need to create facilities and hire staffs in order to cure patients. Diseases and cures are fictional but are based on real life counterparts. The game tries to inject humor everywhere but it fails flat. Especially the whole TV show concept… It turns out Theme Hospital is a TV show and you play 12 episodes where many intrigues, twists and humor are supposed to create a semblance of a storyline. Except they didn’t bother to have voiceacting! Instead your staff (whenever they speak) uses gibberish, not entirely unlike the speech in The Sims. However with incredibly limited voice samples, you’ll hear the same thing constantly.
Gameplay is intuitive: when a sick person comes in, he’s first examined. If the doctor can’t find what’s wrong, he’s sent to the research lab to get more information. Once it’s a known disease, then there’s diagnostics (such as X-Ray, Odor sampler) and finally cure thanks to machines like sensory depravation tank and DNA recombiner. It just takes minutes for a patient to go through the process and leave your hospital… theoretically.
The game suffers from a horrendous AI that makes playing impossible. Staffs would occasionally stop doing their jobs: for example, for no apparent reason, receptionists stop working which means patients can’t get registered, shutting down the entire hospital. Or doctors just don’t see patients anymore. Even engineers who fix your broken machines get stuck fixing a machine which doesn’t get fixed at all! Of course if you could tell the staff to do something, but the commands don’t register either.
In the end, the game could have been quite fun but its buggy state means that enjoyment will have to come from another Tycoon game… and god knows there are so many of them!
Rating: 
(1 out of 5)
Verdict: avoid unless they fix the AI
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2 Responses to Hospital Tycoon review (PC)
GameOver
October 16th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
You forgot, Story Mode is just, doing a handfull of brief easy tasks set around a lame story, that’s set over 13 episodes.
Each episode will take at most 20mins.
Engineers – after a while can’t be told do anything.
You click on them and right click on a machine that’s not broken and you can’t tell them to fix it even if it’s on the verge of breaking down.
Janitors – Just clean the same section over and over again and basically all any do is mop.
The way to fix the receptionist issue is to either delete and rebuild the desk, or tell them to go rest and replacements will take over.
Limited patients to after the first 1hr of gameplay.
I started with 30 patients all with a disease there was no way i could cure with the current funds, but by buying/deleting equipment to cover the minority ailments, eventually i had enough, but then there was only ever 10 at most patients to cover which get fixed withing minutes
And once you have one of every machine and a handfull of extra staff members for each role, there’s no point in playing anymore.
On level 1 of Sandbox Mode I had $400000 5 star Hospital with 100% in every rating and no indication of what was needed to open up the next stage.
I’d even gotten past the second level in Story Mode and still it wasn’t unlocked.
Lastly there is a mod fix/cheates to add something to the game but it’s not worth buying.
They should’ve just revamped Theme Hospital it was a far more entertaining game.
Automotive
July 12th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Cool…..