I know we already had a hospital management game not long ago. it’s actually quite astonishing to ponder that never before in human history have we had two hospital management games released in the same year. We have come so far as a species.
This one is angling for a realistic take on illnesses, and seems to have deeper depths of hospital management relative to The Other Game (which can’t be named, it’s a thread rule ok?).
Eager to hear any first impressions that you may have, I am thinking of picking it up in the next day or so if the initial positive reviews hold.
Well to be fair when they say the real thing, I am not expecting a true simulation. I am curious how much they decided would be fun or how much they also know and of course a comparison to the one that cannot be named because that’s just a good fresh paint on an old fun game. This looks like they’re trying to do something more simulation like and less… gamey / silly.
What I am most interested to see is if the game gives you any pressure to maximise patient throughput and potentially compromise on the quality of their diagnosis or treatment. Almost like the tradeoffs that were present in Prison Architect.
Well, I’m enjoying Project Hospital so far, although there are a few issues I’m running into—unremovable objects, mostly. There’s a chair in the middle of my waiting room that’s colored like someone is trying to sit in it, but nobody ever does.
Some people say there are issues with janitors, staff rooms, and the like only being used by staff in the department the room was built under, but I haven’t run across that yet, I don’t think.
The financial management seems tough-ish so far. I’m not making huge stacks of money.
I got solidly into the midgame (all departments except cardiology, neurology, and the broken bones one whose name I forgot) and put it aside, less as a conscious choice and more because some personal projects started occupying more of my time.
Pros:
Seems to be actively maintained; they just put a patch out recently, which is their tenth, and the Steam forum is moderately active, too.
I think the diagnosis system is really cool. Occasionally, if your doctors can’t figure out a certain case, they’ll forward you the chart so you can play House. (It was lupus once!) Looking at patients, you start to get a feel for what a case is likely to be before the game starts to narrow it down for you. There’s a lot more mystery to it, as opposed to Two Point Hospital, where a patient’s malady is usually pretty obvious.
The way the building system works, my first hospital is developing along the lines of some of the real hospitals I’ve been to. There’s an odd annex adjacent to my emergency department’s ward where a former patient room got repurposed into a sonography room, because I didn’t have space in my radiology wing and had an excess of capacity in the emergency department after I opened wards in other departments. There are a bunch of places with odd dead-ends or rooms with doors on two sides, because foundations are expensive and moving rooms around is difficult.
Cons:
The financial game is, as I said above, super-tough. You don’t make money at the kind of rate you’d have to to finance large expansions without either running the game on high speed for a long time, or taking massive loans. (Which I’ve done a lot of already.)
The building system is a little fiddly. The Steam store page shows a hospital with some cool little terraces and a stair-step structure. I have not yet figured out how to make that happen. I can’t build roof tiles on a roof unless I build a foundation there first, and when I build a foundation, the roof on the next floor up appears. The flip side of it being difficult to move items is that it’s difficult to rearrange rooms too, or fix mistakes in building. A computer, for instance, has to be on a table or desk, and you can’t move any item which is supporting another item. If you don’t have a spare table or desk to put it on, you have to sell it, then move the table, then buy the PC back.
I don’t think it has quite the same kind of charm as 2PH, but I stand by my earlier assessment that it gets a thumbs-up.
I definitely prefer the realistic theme in this game of this more so than 2PH. My main issue is the campaign they throw you into right after the tutorial. I’d learn the game much better if they tasked me with slowly building up a hospital than throwing me into a largely developed one with tons of staff. Also, like fishbreath says the building is a bit clunky.
What modes have people primarily been playing? Is the sandbox better than the campaign? It looks like the DLC adds some scenarios. Are they any good and do they have ones where you start from nothing / very small?
