Need more proof it’s a nineties game? Pre-rendered 3D assets FTW.
Mission accomplished! For now…
This is the single-player campaign. You don’t get much info about any of your missions from here, but the thought is pretty cool.
Theme Hospital’s interface works well in most cases. The highlight is the Bullfrog-style sliding tab notification system, one that featured prominently in Dungeon Keeper as well. As new events transpire, they pop out of the menu block and slide into a queue, giving you easy, glanceable information about what’s going on in your hospital. While there aren’t many complex strategy games released like this these days, it’s an ideal mechanic that I wish had worked its way into other games. When manipulating rooms, you’ll need to work back and forth through a variety of steps, mirroring how they’re built, which can be extremely annoying when you just want to move a door. You’ll need to place each item, be it trash can, toilet, scanning machine, or sofa, back into the space after each modification. Thankfully the game keeps track of what you left in each room.
Leave your hospital alone to, say, go to Arby’s, and you’ll come back to a sea of vomit.
Remember when games had graphs in them? It’s amazing that we thought this was an acceptable way of conveying information.
Like many games of its era, it leaves some of its inner workings to the imagination. I mentioned research earlier, but the AI has a tendency to resort to crazy mode. Place a doctor in a specific room and they leave. An idle doctor will pace back and forth, as if stuck, in a remote part of the hospital (thankfully, you’re given a ‘pick me up’ function to place them where you want). Envision this: There are three pieces of garbage dropped in a hallway. Rather than have a single groundskeeper pick up all three items, your groundskeepers are queued up to pick up one item individually. It’s bizarre.
“And here’s the sofa- oh don’t worry, you’ll get used to the sound of surgical saws soon enough.”
The elixir will cure what ails ya!
Later on, you’ll need to take your specialists to train other specialists.
Still, for all its quirks, and this is indeed a quirky game (British-origin nonwithstanding), I don’t quite feel as enthusiastic about building these hospitals as I did back in The Day. But even if the gameplay doesn’t hold up as well as it could’ve, there’s simply no game like this. Anything close is a mere imitator and simply can’t have the same character that this does. For the price of a Chipotle burrito, you owe it to yourself to bring home one of Bullfrog’s last,best games before they were diced up and tossed away. No one makes games like this anymore.
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