Two Point Hospital

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: In the time since this game was first released, it has since been removed from the Nintendo Switch eShop and replaced with a version of the game subtitled Jumbo Edition, which contains added content. This review is regarding the original core version of the game.)

Two Point Hospital is a Management Sim that is comparable to the classic game Theme Hospital (with this game even being developed by some of the same staff that worked on Theme Hospital), where players control the layout, staffing, and overall management of their own hospital. This game was originally released on PC in 2018 and ported to multiple consoles including the Nintendo Switch in 2020, with this version including the Bigfoot and Pebberley Island DLC, as well as a post-release addition of a sandbox mode. However, and just to get this out of the way upfront, there are no Switch-exclusive features here – no motion controls or touchscreen implementation.

This game’s presentation is nothing if not polished. On a technical level, you get a fair amount of detail here with a lot of hustle and bustle going on in your hospital with no noticeable hit to the game’s framerates, but what really stands out here is the game’s consistent, excellent style. The game has a very distinctive art style that marries pleasant but forgettable music (much of it coming across as very much like elevator music) with a nice, relaxed pastel color palette and cartoony character designs that resemble the stop-motion animated works of Aardman animation studio (of Wallace and Gromit fame). While this is distinctive enough in character portraits, this is further highlighted by the animations of the game’s characters as they mull about your hospital, with different animations for patients depressed over a bad diagnosis compared to those who just received a clean bill of health, different animations for doctors on break compared to those clearly falling apart due to overwork, and different animations for patients suffering from a malady that turns them into a mime compared to patients suffering a malady that makes them think they’re a rock star.

Oh yeah, on that note, this is definitely a very tongue-in-cheek game, and while hospitals, illnesses, and death can be very heavy topics, but this game tries to keep it light and cartoony with silly (and often pun-related) diseases. When you get an influx of people suffering from a pandemic, it’s because they’re literally stuck with pots and pans on their heads that need to be removed with specialized equipment (read: a giant magnet). Patients who are feeling light-headed literally have lightbulbs for heads that require a machine to unscrew the bulb and screw a human head in its place. And when a patient inevitably kicks the bucket, odds are good they’ll leave behind a Scooby Doo-style ghost that your maintenance crew will need to suck up with their vacuums.

In terms of gameplay, this is largely a solid management sim. You’re given a lot of options for managing your hospital and its staff, choosing where rooms are placed, their size and layout, their contents, and which staff are assigned to them (sorta’… more on this in a bit). And you can change these around at whim without a penalty (even deleting placed objects gives you a portion of the cost they were bought for). What’s more, those wanting to get into the nitty-gritty can manage prices for different treatments, the salary and training of each staff member, and even the break schedules.

However, there are problems that come along with this as well. Your staff has a mind of its own, and while you can assign a staff member to a room, if they’re idle for long they’ll go wandering to look for work, and soon enough that results in any task calling for a doctor, nurse, or whatever just drawing on whoever’s available, and those wanting to assign a character permanently to a room or to be a substitute during breaks may be disappointed at the apparent lack of the ability to do so.

What’s more, a lot of the information you need isn’t necessarily easy to access. There wasn’t any one place I felt I could look to see what the biggest problems in my hospital were, what caused the latest budgetary shortfall… heck, even when I had warnings popping up telling me that I was spending too much, I consistently felt I couldn’t trust them because they were pretty much always followed by a surge of money coming in after my expenditures proved to be a worthwhile investment. Multiple times I was told that a staff member would be ready to promote into a higher position after they were trained, but my training room was in use, and I wasn’t given the option to interrupt that training… and as soon as the room emptied, I could not for the life of me find what it was that the staffer needed to train. Really frustrating.

However, I feel like one of this game’s biggest issues is how it locks away much of the game’s nuance and complexity behind its campaign mode, and it can take a considerable amount of time to get to much of it. As time went on, I would see employees unlocking slots for additional skills, and search as I might I could not find any way to add in those skills… only to find that this is not a feature that becomes available until you’re running your third hospital in the game’s campaign. And as I wanted to get a full three stars on every hospital before moving on, this took hours to get to.

Even with all of its shortcomings, Two Point Hospital is still a superb Management Sim with a great presentation and a fair amount of depth. While there are definitely areas that could do with improvement, overall fans of the genre should be very pleased with this game on the Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Two Point Hospital is a solid Management Sim that follows in the footsteps of Theme Hospital and provides a solid entry in the genre with a great presentation, albeit one with some flaws and frustrations that mar an otherwise excellent experience. Still, for fans of the genre, this game is still well worth checking out.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Simulation Game

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