Two Point Hospital - Review
Theme Hospital was a long time ago, but it was a memorable and quirky Hospital management game that has gone too long without a true spiritual successor. Finally some of the people who worked on the game (along with their team) have made the true successor people have been waiting for, and it’s called Two Points Hospital. As someone who as a kid played the Theme Hospital demo disc over and over again before I got to play the full game, I am excited to be able to play Two Point. On that note, Two Point Hospital is finally out on the Switch! (and other consoles too) After simulator games such as Cities: Skylines, the very real concern is can the Switch can handle a jam-packed Hospital ward smoother than the Australian public health care system?
There isn’t a story per se, your aim is to take a hospital and make it a 3 star haven of health and recovery (yet still a hospital). The initial hospitals are also used for tutorial purposes as they introduce new mechanics. They’re introduced with enough time to get a good grasp on each new feature. By the third hospital I began to feel the pressure a little as expectations went up...oh god my hospital is filled with clowns now! Which brings attention to Two Point’s wit infused into the game. It would be way too grim to be managing a lighthearted hospital and dealing with very real life illnesses killing your patients. Instead, Two Point (and Theme Hospital before it) uses humourous conditions that afflict the patients and require some extreme measures to treat. For example, early on there is a condition called Lightheadedness. Instead of the real condition, this ailment has a large lightbulb replacing a patient's head. To fix this you need a De-Luxe Clinic, where a Doctor will unscrew the lightbulb and give the now headless patient a new head in its place. Another has you treating Jest Infection, where patients are turned into clowns and a trip to the clown clinic will have them dehumourfied. There's plenty of other witty illnesses to discover along the way.
Each new hospital brings on new challenges, and the constant balancing act of being prepared or building rooms only when needed. Do I hire more staff to cover when others go on breaks, or do I just micromanage them to keep costs down? Each hospital introduces new illnesses to treat, encouraging you to further hone those management skills. If you want you can always hop back into a previous hospital to increase your star rating there.
At the end of the day it’s all about money. You need funds to build and hire so you can treat people. You need to do it well so you keep getting more money to do more building and hiring. It’s great to be curing patients and not having them linger around the building as a ghost, but if there’s no money it all falls apart.
While I could feel myself getting gradually more bogged down in hospital management, I enjoyed it! Even when my hospital was bursting at the seams with patients, I always felt like I could still get on top of it if I buckled down and managed the hell out of that place.
Two Point Hospital has some of the cheeriest looking hospitals you’ve ever seen. The cartoon visuals are reminiscent of Theme Hospital’s exaggerated characters. With all the moving parts and a hospital filled with staff and patients, I expected a drop in detail to keep the Switch version running smoothly. Yet it runs like a dream, and clear enough to zoom in and see what everyone is doing. This is fortunate because you get to then have a chuckle (at least a smile) when seeing some of the over the top treatment processes for the more out there conditions.
Hopefully you don’t mind Hospital radio, as you’re going to be hearing a lot of it. It fades into the background easily enough. Most of it is not far off from inoffensive elevator music. You’ll also have the PA system giving you information relevant to what’s going on, which is more important to pay attention to.
As I mentioned at the start, after the poor performance of other simulator ports such as Cities: Skylines, Two Points was a real concern. All these worries are for nothing because this game runs better than you could’ve hoped. The game holds up in pretty much every area. While Switch users will tolerate their fair share of compromises to see their games running on the very modestly powered console, you won’t have to do that here. I initially expected the frame rate might struggle to hold up as hospitals got bigger and busier, but if it was straining under all that simulating it didn’t show it. The only time there was a noticeable dip was when the game was loading up the end of year awards, but they interrupt the game regardless of what is happening. It really doesn’t impact the game to any point it becomes an issue, that’s how hard it is to find a minor (non)issue.
Another area that caused some trepidation going into this game was how the controls would translate to consoles. Once again Two Point doesn’t let us down. Menus are relatively easy to navigate and it always shows what buttons do what. It’s easy to move items around when editing rooms, after a minute or two once you pick up the editing controls it’s easy to move whatever you like around however you need it...as long as there’s the space to place it of course. The only bit I could see someone maybe having difficulties is if you really want to super fine tune item placement. Without having a mouse to control the game manages well, but it won’t necessarily please everyone.
Now the box says that there are two DLC packs included. But there are three out on the PC so for now it is unclear if there is more to come, especially with the alien DLC missing. In the meantime there is already so much content in what’s available. There is also a Sandbox mode and Superbug Initiative to come at the end of March 2020.
Two Point Hospital defies expectations. It's a godsend for Theme Hospital fans and a great management game for anyone else. You couldn’t ask for it to run any better whether docked or in handheld, and I love being able to play this game on the go. Two Point Hospital is the game I’ve been waiting for and I know it’ll cure that itch for a lot of others too.
Review code provided by Sega
