Hospitals aren't always bad!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Very amusing and fun to play!

Cons: Too many missions.

The Bottom Line: 
Get this game if you love Theme Park and other simulation games. If you hate complicated games, its not for you.

I loved Theme Park, it was such a great game in its time. So imagine my delight when I saw this, Theme Hospital!

Theme Hospital puts you into the position of director/supervisor. You have to develop, design and control your hospital, keep it running smoothly, get high profits, treat the sick, and keep a low death rate. If you do this you move to a bigger, better hospital with more challenges for big bucks. Sounds simple doesn't it? Believe me, its not! As it is a hospital (obviously) there is sick people. Then it develops into lots of sick people. Then hundreds, then it all can slip out of control very easily.

To become successful, you have to do many things. For one, you have to place the 'rooms' in the right place. Otherwise the patients won't go to the right place, and will start getting angry. Staff are the all important commodity and there are four basic classes you can hire : Doctors, Nurses, Handymen and Receptionists. Each staff
member has certain skills and attributes that will make them suitable for employment at your hospital and they all come with a description of their attitude and approach to work. If you hire all the best staff before your CPU competitors this will greatly enhance your reputation. You must balance the salary each staff member demands against their potential skills and character before employing. The staff can get agitated if you don't let them rest/take a break and sometimes will demand a higher salary. So basically you have to keep the patients and staff sweet.

The goal in most levels is to achieve a good reputation and make a lot of cash. Getting a good reputation comes from curing your patients and keeping them happy (as you can be in a hospital)! at the same time. Money is made from attracting patients after curing others. It doesn't come straight away unfortunately, so you have to wait a while before it comes rolling in.

Playing the game offers a reasonable amount of fun. You do gain a lot of satisfaction from building your hospital and watching it function away. Once it is up and running you can just sit back and watch it all happen.
The only real problems with playability are the interface and controls. It takes a while to get used to the interface. Buttons or icons represent all the actions you can take. Something else which isn't very good is that there is very little written text anywhere. Once you get used to the controls, the game is okay.

The game is hard to work with on a Ps controller. The game was originally made for the computer, so it works best with a mouse. It struggles a bit with a Ps controller. Like I said before, it just takes a while to get used to.

Overall the game is a blast to play. The humour makes the game fun and playable. Unfortunately the entire game is set around a series of levels or missions. Each level has certain success criteria that you must satisfy to move on, there really isn't any scope to explore or build beyond what is required to complete the mission, hence the replay value of this title is limited. There are 12 levels to progress through and each one is interesting and unique. This essentially means that if the game holds your attention long enough to complete the first couple of missions then it is likely to suck you in to playing all of them.

The graphics are quite good, considering there are lots of patients, with their own little animations. The sound is good, the music gets a bit annoying from time to time, but you can live with it. Theme Hospital is very, very playable and incredibly addictive, and it is value for money!