Review: Hysteria Hospital

When I first saw the screenshots and information for Hysteria Hospital, I instantly thought about the 90s hit game Theme Hospital. And in some ways, you can see that perhaps Theme Hospital was an influence when the game was in development. It’s a shame then, for the Wii version at least, that the game is nowhere near as good.

Hysteria Hospital is a point and click game set in several hospitals located around the United States. Nine days is the shortest amount of time it is possible for you to spend in each hospital, and this equates to nine stars that need to be earned for you to progress further. Complete the objectives set, and you’ll earn a star and move into the next day with a new star to earn. Fail one of your objectives however and you’ll have it all to do again during your next day of work. Once all nine stars have been earned, you’ll be moved to a new hospital.

You earn your stars by dragging patients firstly to the diagnosis desk, where the doctor on duty will tell you what treatment the patient requires in the form of a speech bubble. Sometimes you won’t have the facilities available to treat the patient, and that means dragging the poor individual once more, this time into an ambulance where they will be sent to a rival hospital.

No room in A and E

The game is all about treating patients and earning money, and even if you don’t cure a patient, you still earn a little bit of money when sending them to another hospital. So if you’re hospital is currently full to capacity and a patient is close to leaving, you’re not penalised too heavily if you decide to put them in an ambulance and on their way.

So once your doctor has given the patient their diagnosis, it’s time for them to be dragged around once more to the room where their treatment is performed. Patients can find themselves requiring more than one form of treatment. So for example, they may firstly require surgery, followed by some time in a bed.

And this is where your character comes into play, who is a recently graduated nurse. When your patient has been sent to the treatment room, they’ll require a prescription. Clicking on the prescription that is found at the pharmacy and then onto the patient, will see your nurse collect the prescription and take it to the patient where their treatment will begin. In the case above where a patient has surgery and then requires a bed, your nurse would need to take a prescription to the surgery table, and then once the surgery has been completed, to the bed your patient has been sent to.

Jack of All Trades

It’s not just prescriptions that your nurse has to deal with. Other examples of work for your nurse include giving patients drugs to go with their prescription, changing dirty beds and treatment tables, and for some reason that I still haven’t been able to figure out, mend broken machinery by taking the wrench from the pharmacy, and then clicking on the broken piece of machinery. I do know that hospitals are underfunded, but surely a nurse wouldn’t be fixing machinery?

If this all sounds rather easy, then you’d be correct in thinking so. Until you visit your third hospital and then things get really interesting. Up to this point your nurse has been working in hospitals with just one floor, containing very minimal numbers of equipment. The third hospital contains a second floor.

Sick, Tired and Very Grumpy

These added floors really do ramp the difficulty level right up, as you’ll find that trying to keep organised is near impossible, and many of your patients will become unhappy and leave if you don’t take care of them quick enough. And this is easier said than done, as monitoring what is occurring on the other floors is difficult to do. Many occasions I found myself forgetting I had patients on the other floors, meaning they became unhappy and eventually left.

In a game that is all about performing tasks in a certain amount of time, you would hope for controls that were easy to use. And although performing tasks is simple, it does become repetitive very quickly. You’ll also find the controls are very twitchy with the objects you wish to select being missed all too often. There are also many instances where dragging a patient into the lift to send them to another floor doesn’t work, breaking up any rhythm you had and setting you back.

And as you can imagine, missing out on completing your set objectives because of issues such as these really do cause some frustrations to build up. Add this to the repetitive nature of the game, and your frustration levels quickly increase.

This is a public service announcement

You’ll also become bored of the Theme Hospital style announcer quickly as well, as there’s only so many times you can take a grown man singing “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over a Tannoy system.

Although the graphics are pretty poor and do look like something from the PS2, some of the animation is quite good, with some amusement coming when the patients are being treated. I have to admit, there were several occasions where treatments made me chuckle.

Overall the game is very simple to pick up and play, but it’s this simplicity that is the game's downfall. It quickly becomes repetitive, and there are several aspects of the game that will frustrate. The game does become a challenge further on into the game, but by then you’ve seen it all before and had enough. One good thing did come from this game though. I went and played Theme Hospital for the first time in ages.