Two Point Hospital

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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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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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Two Point Hospital: Full Health Collection

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Two Point Hospital may have been the first game from Two Point Studios, but it’s the second to receive an official release on Nintendo Switch 2, after its most recent game, Two Point Museum. Circling back to the beginning comes with an upgrade path for players who own the Nintendo Switch version of the game, but it’s not exactly a clean upgrade… or a cheap one.

Players who own the digital version of the Nintendo Switch release of Two Point Hospital get a half-off discount on the Nintendo Switch 2 release, subtitled Full Health Collection, making this a $20 upgrade. However, it’s even worse than that – because this is a completely different version of the game, your save file won’t transfer over, nor will it make any difference whether or not you bought the original release of the game or the Jumbo Edition and/or any paid DLC content – Full Health Collection contains all DLC ever released for Two Point Hospital, but won’t give you any added discount if you paid for DLC previously.

The result of this is that Two Point Hospital: Full Health Collection is a great buy for players who never purchased the game due to the massive amount of content it has, adding tons more on top of what was already present in the Jumbo Edition on Nintendo Switch… but if you already paid to get as much content as you could on Nintendo Switch, you’ll feel not only a bit cheated out of that good deal, but you’ll probably be more on the fence as to whether to buy this release, since it’ll feel a lot more like double-dipping than upgrading.

To be clear, there is a sizable amount of new content here beyond anything previously released on any console before – in addition to the Jumbo Edition content, this also includes the Culture Shock DLC, A Stitch in Time DLC, and Speedy Recovery DLC, bringing with them 9 new hospitals and 80 new illnesses, among other content. It’s quite a lot, and if you’re coming into the series fresh, this release is only $10 more than the Nintendo Switch version.

Of course, this isn’t just about content. The Nintendo Switch 2 release of the game comes with improved resolution, and even more noticeable is improved framerates that make the game much smoother.

There’s also a noticeable improvement to loading times: On Nintendo Switch, it took me 1 minute 36 seconds to load to title screen, another 11 seconds to load a game save, and 1 minute 6 seconds to load a map. By comparison, those same times on Nintendo Switch 2 were 51 seconds, 7 seconds, and most impressively 19 seconds, a really nice improvement.

That said, this release once again disappoints in that, much like Two Point Museum, Two Point Hospital’s Nintendo Switch 2 release completely drops the ball when it comes to Mouse Mode, a feature that seems so obvious for this game, yet which is not present at all.

In the end, Two Point Hospital: Full Health Collection on Nintendo Switch 2 is a marked improvement over the Nintendo Switch release, and absolutely the better choice if you haven’t previously purchased the game. But if you already own the Nintendo Switch version, it’s really difficult to say this is worth the $20 to upgrade. If you absolutely love this game, you may want to spend the money just for the improvements and added content, but for more casual players I don’t think it’s going to be worth that added expense.

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, and the cost to upgrade to the Nintendo Switch 2 release if you already own the Nintendo Switch version seems too high, even with all the extra content this includes. Still, for fans of the genre, this game is still well worth checking out, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version is absolutely improved over the Nintendo Switch version.

Grade: B-

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