This is a game of many genres. Its a tycoon, because you need to manage a modern hospital. It is also a soap opera because of a storyline with the love triangle. And above all, it is a comedy game, because the medicine has never been so fun! A plenty of humor, greatly animated characters and the presence effect (you can even see the hospital from the eyes of your patients) - believe me, this game too unique to be missed!

In The Beginning…

10 years ago, in 1997, a well-known game developer BullFrog have released one of their biggest hits, a game called “Theme Hospital“. It was very fun hospital tycoon game, and it also was different from many other tycoons, because you were able to see everything that is happened in your hospital. Many people including me still love to play that game. Unfortunately, BullFrog was divided and now a part of people who worked there have created the Lionhead Studio, which is famous by their “Black and White” sequel.

So, Can You Handle The Hospital?

A modern hospital is a huge place with lots of people who working there, and each employee is the individual with own skills and ambitions. Being a successful manager means to do everything to make your patiens happy, and also to keep your staff in a good mood, so they should be happy to work on you. And this is the most exciting fact about the Hospital Tycoon, your staff is not just a stupid computer bots who programmed to make similar tasks. They have skills, have feelings. They love or hate each other. They can talk, and they can be fun or rude. And they even may deside to not follow your orders. You can ask them to talk to each other, and you can assign them to work in different rooms if they don’t like each other. In the game, just look through your hospital, you can see doctors talking about something and also the icons that show the mood of their dialog.

Another detail that makes this game so great are your patients. Believe me, they will make you laugh, because in fact they are too far from hospital realities. You will not see any blood or badly sick people, the reality is too sad to be placed into a game. Instead, you’ll see people with obvious “diseases” and doctors who are trying to “heal” them. For example, there is an illness that is called a “pager man”. Its a woman who have paper stickers glued over his body. What is the medical treatment? - Right, its the acid shower that corrode the paper without hurting a skin. All your patients are funny, so this game will never make you sad.

The graphics is just amazing! Hospital Tycoon has great motion-captured animation of characters, and simple but beautiful textures. System requirements for this game are really low - I have played it on my laptop that have a poor video card (32Mb of shared video memory and the support of DirectX 7, which means no modern 3D features like shaders or so). The only thing I can complain about is the sound. Music is great, but characters speak on some “non-existing” language, which sounds a bit annoying to me. In the original Theme Hospital, characters didn’t speak to each other, and all announcements were done by a recorded natural voice. In Hospital Tycoon, they have decided to not record real conversations, but to create a set of sounds with different intonations and then to use it as “speeches”. Probably they did it to make a huge amount of different dialogs, but I really don’t like how it sounds. Well, its just me

Conclusions

Hospital Tycoon have everything to be a good game. Quality animation, many interesting characters, storyline, simple control and artificial intelligence that makes it all live it’s own life - this is a different world, where you will spend hours and hours playing it. The game has several modes to play - a story mode and sandbox (all patients and equipment is enable from the start, and you can play as long as you want improving your hospital). This is a retail game, which means that you need to buy a CD in order to play it.

Official Homepage of Hospital Tycoon

Filed under: Game Reviews