Review: Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward

Finding DS screenshots is very hard. Draw your own conclusions.

There are a lot of titles for the Nintendo DS and they all sport the Nintendo Seal of Quality stamp on the back of the box. The problem is, much like the Wii, the DS has seen more than its fair share of turkeys released. Even Nintendo fanboys must be left wondering if that stamp actually means anything anymore. Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward is a simple, repetitive game which offers a few hours of gameplay. It also offers the perfect proof that they’ll hand those stamps out to anyone nowadays.

The game opens with a choice of male or female nurse. This is followed by a series of 2D cartoon concepts and text which inform you in bad English that you have graduated from nursing school and secured a job at a medical facility. You then take a flight to your first job via the map of America which you’ll return to as you progress through various hospitals. After clicking through this inauspicious start you are dumped into the opening tutorial.

You have an isometric view down on the 2D action and you control the nurse by tapping on various points on the screen with your stylus. This sends her scurrying to the location and if there is a job needing done there she’ll automatically do it. You can also tap and drag patients around to doctors, machines and beds so they can be treated.

The nurse is stuck with all the running around jobs and must deliver a prescription to each station whether it is a doctor, machine or bed before the patient can be treated. They also have to clean up the bed or treatment table before it can be used again and the poor overworked dears are even expected to roll the sleeves up and fix machines when they break down.

Ooh Matron

The first level starts you gently with a slow stream of patients and a very small selection of possible treatments all set within a single floor hospital. As the game progresses and you complete nine challenges you move onto the next establishment. With each new destination the number of treatments increases and some require patients to visit a machine or doctor before a bed stay. You also work in hospitals with multiple floors so you have to zoom up and down in elevators. The final difficulty mechanic which ramps up is the patience of the patients. Normal people will wait for a while before storming out in disgust, old people are less patient and mothers with screaming babies are the least patient of all.

Each level has a target number of patients to treat and a target amount of cash to make. Between levels you can spend the cash on new machines or treatments, higher wages to speed up the staff or things like water coolers to calm the patients down. It is a simple system to make life easier for you as the difficulty ramps up.

The basic cartoon style and humorous animations for the bizarre treatments are reminiscent of Hospital Tycoon. Hysteria Hospital has a lot less depth though and the comedy is strangely mixed, you’ll get daft treatments such as the steamer mixed in with CAT scans and operating tables. The developers would have done better to adopt an entirely joke approach.

Doctor on the Job

In addition to the campaign mode which takes you through 7 hospitals there is also an endless mode. That sounds like fun doesn’t it? No it doesn’t. Sadly it is endlessly repetitive and just gets faster and more challenging over time. At the end of the day all you are doing is click management. Make sure you click on things in the most efficient order to treat maximum patients. There really isn’t anything else to this game.

Despite the basic nature of it Hysteria Hospital it does have an addictive hook and I found myself playing it for a few hours. It was mildly enjoyable in the same way that a really addictive flash game might grab you but then you wouldn’t pay money for a flash game. Even at a budget price this is limited stuff and worse it does have some buggy elements. I eventually stopped playing after buying an operating table and finding it virtually impossible to drag the patient off again.

Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward is an addictive blast of fast paced fun which quickly becomes a boring repetitive chore. The dual screen isn’t really used. The top screen merely shows your timer. The stylus action is awkward because you can stack a move which also means you have to click twice to cancel and inevitably leads to some accidental clicks which lose you vital seconds. There is simply not enough content here to justify the price and amongst the mountain of DS releases this is hopelessly average.