Two Point Hospital Review (Nintendo Switch)

Game: Two Point Hospital
Genre: Simulation
System: Nintendo Switch  ( Also on Steam, Console & Mobile)
Developers | Publishers: Red Kite Games | Two Point Studios | SEGA
Age Rating: EU 3+| USA E 10+ | AUS PG
Price: EU €39.99 | US $39.99 | AU $59.99 | CA $57.99| UK £34.99

No review code used, I bought it myself. 

Two Point Hospital is a simulation game originally released as a PC game, developers Red Kite Games have now released Two Point Hospital across all consoles. If you remember the 90’s classic simulation game Theme Hospital on the PC, then you are familiar with this type of simulation game.

For those that have never heard of Theme Hospital (What rock have you been hiding under?😂) Two Point Hospital is a simulation game where you manage an increasingly difficult series of hospital and budgets. Laying out rooms, hiring and managing staff, caring for patients, research new treatments  and hospital environments all come under your care.

Begin at the Beginning

As the game opens you’re introduced to your hospital where you will learn the ropes of the game, and there is plenty to learn. There isn’t a stand alone tutorial, instead the tutorial is incorporated into the gameplay and covers all of the care of your first two or three hospitals.

Everything the player needs to know is gradually introduced, such as constructing rooms and why you need those particular room’s. It never feels overwhelming, it doesn’t even feel like you in a tutorial it blends in so well the gameplay .

Where to Start

You start by placing a reception desk near the front door, hire an assistant to work at the desk. Next to build is a GP’s office so the patients can see a Doctor you have just employed. After that you move on to building a Pharmacy and employing a Nurse to run the pharmacy and dispense medicine to the patient. And don’t let your patients get bored or too tired while they are waiting to see a health care professional. Patients will need benches to sit on while waiting. Water fountains, posters, and snack machines as well as lots of other items will need to be placed to make sure everyones visit is a pleasant and stress-free experience.

As I’ve said your hospital starts as a large empty floor plan, but building new rooms is as simple as clicking and dragging on the hospital floor, after which you add some furniture and click on the check mark. A whoosh indicates that your new GP’s office or Laboratory or Fracture Ward is ready to go. Its all very gratifying to watch as you hospital grows from an empty shell of a building into a busy thriving top class health care facility. Oddly the game insists that most of the room’s are built to a 3×3 size but later on, as you move through the levels, you do have a bit more freedom to make bigger rooms.

Not All Plain Sailing

Obviously it’s not all plain sailing. In good simulation games it’s a case of juggling tasks and making decisions and things can go wrong. And trust me, they will go wrong.

You hire a Doctor and give him or her a GP’s room to diagnose patients in. Then before you know it there is a queue outside your one and only Doctors office, so you build another office. Another Doctor will want a pay rise but that might break the budget.

A Nurse is looking for the Staff room to have her tea break in so you build a staff room. Another problem has been sorted. But it’s never long before a patient turns up at reception  with a disease you haven’t researched. And then in the middle of everything your Lux-O-Luxe machine breaks down just as your one and only janitor is cleaning up the mess a ghost left behind, it’s all madness and a whole lot of fun.

Medical Emergency

Your hospital develops and is treating more and more patients with increasing zany illnesses and diseases.  You really wouldn’t want to be suffering from those yourself, but we will get to that shortly.

The Two Point Hospital Ministry of Health will rate your hospital with one, two or three stars, with one-star being a requirement to unlock the next hospital site. All the hospitals are placed on a map and once you have received one star on a hospital, you can move on to the next one. Or you can keep building your one star hospital up. You also receive Kudosh, the in-game currency, which you earn by completing game wide objectives, such as healing a designated number of patients. Kudosh is used to unlock items in the menu which you can use to decorate your hospital with to keep staff and patients happy.

You’ll encounter medical emergencies and get an influx of patients with some very random and silly illnesses. Patients suffering from the complaint of Light-Headed are indicated by the light bulb they have for a head. A little time spent in the De-Lux-O-Luxe machine where the machine twists off the light bulb patients head and replaces it with a human head will soon see your patient feeling much better.

You might experience a Pan-Demic which requires the use of Extract-O-Pan machine which removes a saucepan from the patients head, in a very painful looking way. Or there could be an out-break of Freddy Mercury impersonators in their yellow jackets that have all arrived at once and have formed a gyrating queue at reception.

If things get really bad a  patient can die and their ghost will haunt the corridor of your hospital for a short while, scaring patients until it fades away leaving a puddle on the floor for your janitor to clean up. You can train a janitor in the training room, in ghost busting skills who will catch any ghosts in a vacuum cleaner. The choices are endless between what you can and what you should do and best of all, it is left to you to decide, making Two Point Hospital what a proper management, strategy game should be.

Catchy Music and Claymation

Even when it comes to the games soundtrack the developers have went the brilliant but unusual route of having catchy music tracks intercut by radio DJ’s talking and cracking jokes. The soundtrack somehow manages to never get boring and remains constantly entertaining with amusing voice acting and music.

The sound effects are just as entertaining and your hospital has a tannoy system which cuts into the music to make announcements when there is something important to tell you or the patients. You’ll hear such things as “We apologise for the litter, that you dropped on our floor” or ” Security alert, Please Stay alert”. And my favorite which it really shouldn’t be is ” Clean up required, dead patient in corridor” .

I really like the comic claymation style visuals that remind me of Wallace and Gromit. Watching some of the antics of the patients being “cured” in the zany, wacky machines is very funny. There are a lots of touches of satirical, dark humour in the game, which appeals to my sense of humour and I find myself smiling while playing.

Two Point Hospital is controlled using the joy-cons and it works extremely well, no glitches or crashes, the game works as it should.

Conclusion

Two Point Hospital is instantly accessible to the player, it is a modern management game with a classic strategy gameplay that keeps you hooked. Civilization fans will know the saying “Just one more turn” where you think to yourself, I’ll have one more turn and then quit: hours later you’re still playing and before you know it it’s 3am. Two point hospital is that sort of simulation game. It sucks you right in.

There is a very delicate balance in management or strategy games of keeping the player busy but not being overwhelmed. In my opinion Two Point Hospital has managed to do that brilliantly and with lots of humour.

My score for Two Point Hospital is..

Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up!!