Decibelle: I love this game, but it shouldn’t be played on a school night. It is far too easy for would-be micro-managers to become so absorbed that sleep, food, and human contact are indefinitely suspended.
What sets this game apart from others is that it maintains a cute façade while cramming in a host of variables to be poked, prodded, and tweaked in the quest for a optimum hospital performance.
In this case you assume the role of an up-and-coming manager, building and raising a succession of empty hospitals to the giddy heights of medical elitism. The screen view is simple and colourful isometric grid, with tiny characters parading a variety of quirky ailments.
Where theme hospital really shines is cute animations which depict everything from surgeons scrubbing up, to nurses administering cures, to patients projectile vomiting in the hallways. Each ailment also has an associated animated cure, which are a fascination to watch. Include the continual streams of foot-traffic through the hallways and the occasional scamper of little mice, and you have a veritable candy store for the eyes!
To start your tenure at each hospital, you are given a series of goals which may include curing patients, increasing hospital value, increasing bank balance, and maintaining reputation. While fulfilling these criteria in the earlier levels is easy, the number of variable increases rapidly to quickly challenge players of all levels.
Rooms must be built to house key equipment, and each of the rooms have a pre-defined minimum size. My only criticism is that in some cases the room sizes are luxuriously bigger than the equipment they need to house. Fabulous layouts can be thwarted by a single psychiatrist demanding an office worthy of a hotel lobby. On the flipside, nurses are able to attend a small army of patients in a single ward by cramming in extra beds.
Health inspectors and VIPs love visiting your hospital, with reputation and money boosts if they are suitably impressed. The VIPs also award prizes for an odd blend of achievements (or not), which serve as a useful way to judge the success of your playing style. All this is punctuated by the endearing service announcements, ever so politely requesting patients not to die in the corridors.
And it has a point! Nothing irks me more than playing for days at a time, with the sad knowledge that it has achieved absolutely nothing (did someone say Sims?). Theme Hospital deftly avoids this conundrum by giving us goal-oriented players short, medium, and long term progress tracking, like real time stats and comparisons against competing hospitals, and quarterly awards to recognise good or bad performance, and ethics (or lack thereof).
Eventually, you will either triumph over the other players, or tear your hair out battling a succession of rat plagues, epidemics, walk-outs, and chronic debt (from the jolly old bank manager). With each new hospital your playing piece moves around a vintage game board, which provides an overall demonstration of your long-term progress throughout the game.
My game repeatedly crashes at the fourth or fifth hospital, due more to the age of the game (I hope) than any technical failing. Despite this, I had many a fun filled hour healing and dealing, and give it a hearty thumbs up!
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