Hospital Tycoon review (PC)

Remember when Bullfrog branched out from the idea of Theme Park with Theme Hospital? Well that was a few years ago now but Bullfrog's title was well received and could have launched a genre. Well, a revamp from Codemasters is enough to get excited about but Theme Hospital cast a long shadow. Hospital Tycoon promises a lot with plenty of humorous illnesses and a story running through it. It's got a modern 3D interface with cartoon style graphics to help add to the humorous feel but can it live up to the legacy of Theme Hospital?

Call 999

Hospital Tycoon takes place in either a story mode or a sandbox mode within a fantasy hospital where everything is available all in one place. You're in control of examination rooms, treatment rooms, research and all aspects of the appearance of the inside of the hospital. You can also control the interactions of your various staff. When you hire staff, you can choose based on salary, skill and personality traits. If you match personality traits amongst your staff, then they will get on with each other better and apparently they'll work better that way. It's a neat idea but, sadly, it seems to be completely pointless.

I didn't really notice any difference by telling the staff to interact in certain ways. They'll automatically rest when they need to and interact with each other when they have spare time. There doesn't actually seem to be any need to direct the staff to do anything. It does help to pass the time when you're waiting for stuff to happen but then you distract the staff from what they're supposed to be doing when you get sudden rush of patients.

The machine that goes ping

So, the Sims element of the game is a bit pointless, although a neat idea so what else does it have to offer. Well, the other unique aspect of the game, I suppose, is the story. The game is designed as a campy soap opera parody. Between missions, in story mode, you get a 2D cut-scene telling some daft soap opera-esque plot such as the theft of diseases from the research room. It's supposed to be fun and it is but again it's not fully thought through. Again the plot doesn't really carry over into the missions. In fact, the plot runs between the missions but actually has no other discernible impact on proceedings.

You're guided through the missions by a pop-up assistant who talks to you in a kind of subtitled sim-speak in an effort to increase the parallels with the Sims. It's a bit irritating and you don't seem to be able to jump ahead while they're speaking which makes it a bit more irritating. Ultimately it's not too bad but it is a bit distracting. I like to be able to skip through the speech sometimes if I'm a bit short on time for a gaming session, especially when it's not relevant to get the level completed.

There are never enough beds

Still, this is just window dressing and not really that important in the scheme of things. Theme Hospital was well received and it only had the core game really, well you could shoot the rats the infested your hospitals too but anyway. Hospital Tycoon does try to capture the essence of a good hospital sim but, as seems to be the way with this game, it isn't fully there. With an aim, presumably, of keeping simplicity the level of control and detail in the management is rather lacking. You can choose which rooms to put where and what machines go in.

You can decorate the hospital with flowers and plants and posters on the walls. You can hire staff and that's about it. You can't control what you're staff do, except for interactions, you can't cancel actions so that your staff get back to work when you have a backlog and you can't direct your research. When a patient comes in with an illness you haven't previously seen, they're sent to the research lab and automatically diagnosed. They then hang around until you've built everything that you need to be able to treat the disease. It's all a bit shallow and disappointing really.

Over at the nurses' station

Looking after the staff is pretty straightforward as you would expect. Click on a staff member to get a context menu. From here you can perform some basic interactions like following them or looking through their eyes. With a staff member selected you can click on another object, either furniture or another staff member and have the two interact. For an object, the interaction is fairly obvious, they can sit on the sofa, play pinball and so on. When you click on another staff member you can make them interact on a personal level. The options here are governed by the personality traits of the person you highlighted first and, to an extent, to the relationship between the two characters.

If the character you selected is mean then you can shove the other person or carry out some other mean activity. If your character is friendly you can carry out a friendly activity like telling the other person a joke. Their reaction will affect the relationship between the two characters. As male and female characters build stronger relationships you can get them to embrace or kiss in their friendly actions. That's about the extent of the impact that the relationship has on the game. It doesn't seem to affect the running of the hospital just the actions that appear on the context menu. Of course, the characters tend to carry out these actions on their own if you leave them alone with the same impact on the game.

Cardiac Arrest

It's a shame really because Hospital Tycoon looks like it should be good. It's well presented with good animation. The patients come in and it's obvious what's wrong with them. The illnesses are all visually appealing and humorous. The background music is a bit tedious but it's not too bad as the sound effects suit the surroundings. You can even look through the eyes of the patients and staff, which provides a nice distraction. It's even got the basics of the hospital management genre down with the variety of illness and the types of equipment that needs to be installed and maintained. It's just a problem that most of what should be the good ideas aren't really very well thought through.

The story is reasonably good, reasonably well told but has absolutely no discernible impact on the game. The macro level management is fine, you can control the interior of the hospital but there's no micro level management. You can't control research, it's very difficult to really affect the speed of a patients progress through the hospital and so on. It seems that for everything that's been done well, something else misses the mark. It all adds up to a game that's sadly rather disappointing. It's all the more disappointing because it promises so much and because it is so reminiscent of the classic Theme Hospital. I can't really recommend it as it misses the mark in several important ways. Maybe Hospital Tycoon 2 will clear up these but for now I'd give this a miss.