You control every tile of the hospital floor, from the amount of vending machines to how much you pay your surgeons. It does get tiresome, especially after hearing the bossa-nova-flavored lounge music loop for the 70th time, but for a short while it can be as addictive as OxyContin.
Hospital Tycoon is an excellent hospital simulation, that at it's core is a addicting and fun game. Although the short comings are many like the cheesy story, annoying voices and characters. But once you finish the short forgettable campaign free play mode is where the game shins. I would recommend Hospital Tycoon to any strategy/simulation fan but don't go into this game expecting high standard story telling nor complextivity.
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."
Sadly, ten years on, Hospital Tycoon has added nothing new to "Theme Hospital's" stellar gameplay and ends up feeling, a bit like its subject, cold and clinical. [Aug 2007, p.75]
Theme hospital was awesome; it had good humour, freedom to mess around (within the limits of the technology then), and was visually and otherwise (especially the music and soundeffects) appealing. The game dynamics were fun and challenging, and there were almost no bugs.
This was supposed to be a re-iteration of that great game, using current technology.
A transition to 3d is obvious, as are some other graphical improvements. However, the quality, especially with available technology, is laughable. The first thing you see is a start-screen in 640 by 480. Which does not scale after setting the resolution to HD. In-game, even with HD, the quality is severely lacking.
The gameplay is somewhat unchanged, which is where they score a point or two. However, somehow they managed to make the gameplay a bit repetitive and annoying. There are copious tutorials, and you're never lost, but the amount of freedom is tiny.
In the first level, one of the first things you hear, is the hospital administrator talking. It's not actually English or anything; the apparently only had the budget for a fake Sims-language. The "Ba ba, baba, ba" really gets on the nerves after a while, up to the point where I flip off ALL the sound effects. The three music tracks also repeat every five minutes, so eventually I played the game on mute.
In Theme Hospital, the fun was in making and running a hospital. The doctors usually were a 'cog in the machine', and weren't that interesting. In few cases, they could mess things up by overworking, and then they were a minor annoyance. Apparently, the developers decided that annoyance was be the primary part of the game, so you're constantly bothered by some ridiculous drama that makes Grey's Anatomy look 'authentic'. Here's where the game loses most points; it's just not fun if this nonsense keeps popping up.
Right, back to Theme Hospital, which actually can run on today's computers. Unlike this: it only runs on the laptop, while the three PC's are running proper games.
There is a problem with simulation games, and that is that it's easy to have them turn into generic click-fests. Without dynamic challenges, you're soon forced into repeating the same tasks, **** all the charm from everything.
And unfortunately, that about wraps up Hospital Tycoon. Once you get over the tutorial levels, all you're doing is repeating the same tasks over and over, and the hospital never really changes.
The game is built around the idea of running a hospital from a TV drama. As such, each level starts off with a small vignette detailing the latest drama around the "Characters", your staff. And then you get dropped into a soulless, repetitive hospital simulator, pushing the same things around and around, much like dealing with a real public hospital, except with less depth.
The game tries to go in the same humorous vein as Theme Hospital did, but in a much less interesting way. The diseases give characters things like sneezing fits, or odd colours, but it feels puerile instead of funny. You send them to the diagnostician, have them sent to pharmacy, check out their conditions in your research room, and nearly die of ennui. The game as a whole treats patients as a side-effect of its real illness: Causing drama amongst the staff. You can order your staff to go and be romantic at other characters, fight with them, make friends or make out. The only thing lacking is a point. I don't really WANT to make my nurses slap each other over and over. I don't CARE if the charming male doctor makes the ladies swoon (And why not make the men swoon? Oh right, mature themes are bad for games, lets have sex and violence). I want funny illnesses and challenges that are adaptive, not just "There are more patients, oh noes".
What makes it an even harder slog is that the interface you have for ordering your staff around is fiddly, ugly, and unintuitive. Even if I want to make one of the pharmacists go and drink water for an hour like they're working on the side of a road instead of the side of a pill counter, it would drive ME mad first.
I bought this game in a Steam sale, and it cost me about $5 and then 2 hours or so of my life before I just couldn't play anymore. I want them both back. This is appallingly boring. I'm giving it a 3 because it's not actually buggy, and the concept is at least different... But I simply don't want to play it ever again.
Absolutely Horrible. Nothing much to say apart from the fact that you shouldn't buy it. I played this for a whole 10 minutes before I decided that I'd return it to the store. No wonder it was only $8.
This game is absolutely useless. There is a bug where the patients will stop seeking treatment and just chug coffee in the lobby until they die. Don't waste your money on this game. IT IS BROKEN AND HAS NO SUPPORT FROM DEVELOPERS AT ALL!!! I bought this on steam, but this game isn't even worth the time to torrent.
SummaryAt the Sapphire Beach Medical Institute, the lives and loves of the hospital's doctors and nurses, as well as the sneezes and diseases of its patients, come alive. Fusing Tycoon-style gameplay with character simulation and a light-hearted narrative, Hospital Tycoon gives players a soap-opera feel as they progress through episodes of hosp...