Healthcare in this day and age is kind of…well crap. Hospitals will charge you an arm and a leg to fix the other arm and leg, chances are your insurance will find some way to stiff you and spending a day in a ward filled to the breaking point with people coughing up their lungs isn’t good for your overall health. That got me thinking: How hard could it be to run a hospital? After all, some qualified staff, human compassion and wanting to actually help people should make for a morally profitable venture…right?
Well kind of! And then reality came knocking on my door as my patients began dropping dead, people with Mock Star syndrome began getting in the way and all my fancy new machinery came down with a slight case of being on fire. So who decided to murder his morality and has two thumbs? This guy. Two Point Hospital was a quirky return to medical malpractice when it launched on PC a while back, as SEGA’s updated take on managing the daily ins and outs of a local hospital made for pure admin anarchy.
Facilities had to be built, staff needed to be managed and patients needed to be seen to in a massive game of surgical strategy at the time. So how do you take all of that bungling bureaucracy, and translate it to a mere handful of buttons and zero mouse support on PC? Quite well actually. SEGA and Two Point Studios roped in Red Kite Games to help translate the PC experience to console, with the result being a faithful but detailed control scheme that’ll have you running your hospital facility smoothly. Well, until you cock it all up with bad financial decisions.
There’s an intuitive transfer of control here, one that makes the best use of the PlayStation DualShock 4 or Xbox One Controller to keep the medical action flowing at a smooth clip. Zooming in and out of your hospital is easy enough, face buttons are instinctively mapped to the right functions and the user interface doesn’t interfere with what needs to be done at any given time.
It simply works, and that alone is a modern miracle that makes the console ports not only palatable but possibly preferable when you have multiple systems to choose from. Beyond that, it’s almost exactly the same as the PC version. You’ve got all that dry British wit to spice up your sterile waiting rooms, the cartoony art style is delightfully chunky and the game runs at a respectable pace on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
To be fair, footage from the Nintendo Switch version has been somewhat more limited, struggling to stay consistent the busier your hospital gets and eventually chugging along when compared to its bigger brothers. On PS4, I’ve also heard reports of glitches and crashes that wiped out entire save game states but none of that happened to me.
What did happen for me, was that I got a quirky management game that hit the sweet spot between silly and clinical. Two Point Hospital makes for an addictive game of micromanagement as you juggle duties with goals, zipping between rooms and trying your best to keep your entire operation running smoothly while turning a tidy profit. Additional modes such as Sandbox Mode and The Superbug Initiative will arrive on consoles by the end of the month as a gratis upgrade, but for now Two Point Hospital builds on the PC version and incorporates many of its other quality of life improvements to the mix.
Last Updated: March 3, 2020
| Two Point Hospital | |
|
Whether you’re pining for the good ol’ days of sim management madness or you’re new to the idea of simulated insanity in the workplace, Two Point Hospital clearly has the cure for whatever ails you.
|
|
|---|---|
| Two Point Hospital was reviewed on PlayStation 4 | |
|
82 /
100
| |
