Hospital Tycoon

Once every few years a games company decides to try and have a go at the idea of making a hospital god (economic simulation) game. This time its Codemasters attempt at a hospital comedy with its new release Hospital Tycoon  In Hospital Tycoon your goal is to build up a hospital from scratch to treat any number of bizarre cases in the classic sandbox mode or complete E.R. style soap-opera objectives in the game’s story mode via a number of levels in game known as episodes. When you start playing, it is immediately apparent how a lot of the game is like the mid 1990′s PC title Theme Hospital. Gameplay involves building up your hospital’s rooms, adding more to get more equipment inside to diagnose new types of patients’ conditions and treat them. At the same time you also have to manage your staff and keep and eye on the budget. A nice feature is the ability to see a first person view of your hospital from any character’s perspective.  Some of the patients’ comedy complaints range from Jibba Jabber caused by excessive mobile phone usage and Golf Rage Victim, a poor soul who is stuck with a golf club bent around their head. All these patients require bizarre treatment equipment to be built and maintained, like the Odour Sampler. While you only have three different hospital layouts to play with throughout the game, the graphics are nice in variety but don’t quite reach impressive levels. We can only hope that a patch comes out which tweaks the graphics and adds some much needed details to the environment. As while everything is here there are textures which would make things a lot better. So it may be better in the future but as it stands the graphics are not half bad.  Unfortunately, the sound is repetitive and borderline annoying. This is caused by the speech system with the characters all taking a non-language with pitch giving their mood. It would be better to have no sound at all rather than this. The other bad point is you are stuck with only a few set room sizes that can be built and there is no option to use a custom size so the rooms will not fit together once the hospital is built up. If you are after a recent hospital comedy you could do worse than Hospital Tycoon. If you keep the sound off, it’s a much better game.