Two Point Hospital Review

Two Point Hospital is exactly the same game as Theme Hospital. They are completely identical. This positive message could have ended here if Theme Hospital hadn’t been released ten thousand years ago.

TH was released so long ago that the company Electronic Arts… Electronic Arts, selling unfinished games, amputating content from them, stuffing the leftovers into DLC wrappers, and selling them as separate paid subscriptions, the company Electronic Arts gave away Theme Hospital for free in their digital store Origin for a while. EA gave away a hit project for free.

That’s how old it is. You probably haven’t played it. I probably haven’t played it. Most likely, the passage about Two Point Hospital being identical to Theme Hospital doesn’t tell us anything.

So, our days, the peninsula of Nizhnie Tutovki. Local residents, suffering from strange diseases caused by an excess of puns in their heads, need another new hospital. And you know what? It’s a profitable business. $500 for a diagnosis, another $2,000 for a stay in the ward, and finally, a final $5,000 for the procedure of twisting the light bulb from your unhealthy neck.

It’s time to make our hospitals great again.

As usual, you will build your entire first medical anthill under the careful guidance of a computer advisor. It will tell you where to place the registration desk, which employee to assign to it, how the local offices are built, and everything else.

At the same time, we will work on a large scale right from the start. Honestly, I would have agreed to equip a small debut medical center with two and a half offices faster. But no – the game from the start requires a serious approach to extracting money from the sick. By the end of the first mission of the local campaign, I managed to build a complex currency vacuum cleaner. Four, it seems, reception rooms, two healthy wards, just as many, if not more, diagnostic stations, several pharmacies, a laboratory with a device for twisting light bulbs out of heads, staff smoking areas, toilets, dozens of vending machines with chocolates and cola, a newspaper kiosk, and whole jungles of plants in pots. Here’s your first task.

However, the fact that the very first mission of Two Point Hospital consumed two hours of my time is partly my own fault. After congratulating me on a successful start, the game with one hand dragged its hero to explore new territories, and with the other hand subtly introduced several new challenges into the director’s office of the already built hospital.

Getting three out of three stars for a level is a well-known sacred duty of every avid gamer. Plus, in the first few stages, all we have to do is run an additional 50 patients through the local healthcare system and plaster all available walls with posters saying “Wash your hands before eating” and fake medical diplomas. If you buy a wholesale batch of those – the prestige of the institution will skyrocket!

However, the further up the career ladder you go, the trickier the challenges will become and the more annoying the initially non-obvious flaws of the game will be.

Personally, what annoys me the most in TPH is the mandatory cosmetic work. The Sims is everything to us, but the charm of all these colorful stalls, posters about a healthy lifestyle, cacti in pots, and other exercise bikes is not to fill all the rooms and corridors with them.

Locations in tycoons are like bonsai gardens. I want the delicate branch of the corridor to end with a concise cactus, harmoniously contrasting with the vending machine selling soda. I want grateful clients to huddle in a room with whimsical geometric walls, cleverly playing off five steel beds, where under the watchful eye of a nurse sitting on her bureaucratic throne next to a lonely avant-garde canvas. And Two Point Hospital makes you go all out. The more ficuses, carpets, and posters, the better, and it doesn’t matter how things go together.

You build your dream hospital, you build, and at the very end of the mission, you are given the task of raising the establishment’s prestige, and that’s it. Until you ruin your own work, you can’t go home. It’s frustrating.

Killing beauty in pursuit of the coveted three stars, you start noticing other unpleasant things. For example, interface quirks.

Overall, TPH menus do a great job. For example, hiring new doctors is simple and straightforward. Clicked the “Hire” button, instantly figured out who is available on the job market, hired a rookie. Or rejected all current candidates and sat waiting for luck, as it goes.

But in the furniture procurement menu, there is a mess of medium proportions. There are so many stalls, arcade machines, and curtains in TPH that somewhere around the second hour of playing, the scroll wheel starts to detach from the mouse, and your finger responsible for that scroll wheel starts to ache. Nothing is grouped, categorized, or logically organized; the further you go, the more chaotic it gets.

The designers timidly attempted to move items that can only be placed, let’s say, in the office for transforming pathological clowns into normal people (yes, there is such a thing in the game), into a separate tab. Then they stuck that tab in the opposite corner of the screen from the “standard” one, and for complete happiness, buried it in a separate submenu that opens when selecting those special rooms.

You can actually see the aforementioned button quite well, but for the first four hours, I thought it simply slightly filters the general chaos and removes items that cannot be placed in a specific room. The truth only became clear when my indispensable computer assistant started pushing some unusual furniture at me for a special currency. And at first, it seemed like Sega was following in the footsteps of EA with their The Sims, demanding three real dollars for every two new pixelated chairs.

Luckily, that wasn’t the case. Two Point Hospital generously gives out special coins called “krunts” (interpret the name as you wish) for free. Well, by the standards of modern games, for free – for completing missions, side quests, and all that stuff.

So, I bought some floor medical scales with krunts, set aside three thousand virtual dollars for their wholesale purchase, and when I went into the menu, they were nowhere to be found. I thought maybe I needed to restart the mission?

In short, the test for being a spoiled fool who appreciates good game design, Two Point Hospital passed with a C.

But the jokes soaked in naphthalene never failed. Incredibly sharp witticisms for pensioners poured through the screen already in the introductory video. Translators tried to cover up half of the elderly jokes, but the elderly ear hears everything. Where modern linguists, ashamed of the truth, wrote in subtitles that certified doctors of TPH just watched the “Health” channel, the original voice boldly declares that nobody watched any vague channel. The doctors of our hospitals learned from the series ER. It’s the same as “Emergency Care”; childhood, the “NTV” channel, and a young George Clooney in the role of a pediatrician with a golden heart and an insatiable libido. Veterans remember, veterans appreciate.

Well, yes, there are people with light bulbs instead of heads, mummies, and other restless doppelgangers of Freddie Mercury wandering around hospitals. Because the main audience of Two Point Hospital doesn’t understand well who they are… and what’s good in modern music at all? Queen, yes, but any of yours… someone we didn’t listen to in childhood, so patients are delirious about Freddie.

The cherry on top is the arcade machines on which you can see the second level of Sonic & Knuckles. When, remember, Sonic got caught on Robotnik’s flying ship, jumped on disgusting uncomfortable platforms and a chasm, and for three hundred years tried to crawl through incomprehensible cylinders made of metal mesh.

In short, the map of nostalgic humor with jokes in the style of “Airplane” TPH plays out excellently. The king of absurd economic strategies has returned to show hundreds of dull imitators how it’s really done.

The distinguishing feature of all truly good games is that they can be recommended to any gamer. Two Point Hospital, despite being a remake of the progenitor of the “Funny Tycoon” subgenre, is good even if you don’t particularly like economic strategies, The Sims, isometric ant farms in general, ancient jokes about ancient pop culture, or Sega’s new computer-strategic face.

Perhaps, in order to complete all the tasks in all the hospitals of TPH, you really have to love tycoons, but to simply have a fun time playing, you don’t need any preparation at all. Two Point Hospital is good even in isolation from its entire context.

At the basic strategic level, you (ahem, almost) always understand what you should do and why. Tactical tasks change from stage to stage and don’t allow you to fully relax, but if you want to, go ahead – just choose a room to your liking and do whatever you want with it, and then enjoy the lively picture you’ve created. Doctors fool around in empty rooms, janitors catch ghosts of the deceased right in the patient corridors, administrators annoy and want salary, food, and a restroom all at once, and a crowd of customers rolls in waves into the wards, crying but giving money to the cash register.

Two Point Hospital is a success.