Theme Hospital

"It will keep you in stitches! I'd prescribe it to anyone!"

I’ve always been a fan of simulator type games, and after playing several different Maxis simulators over the years (including Sim Farm…what’s that all about??) I thought I’d seen it all. Boy, was I wrong. Theme Hospital not only manages to deliver the realistic headache of managing a hospital, but also administers a healthy dose of humor as well. It also manages to be an extremely challenging game past a certain point, too, almost too much so. Read on for my prognosis:

Story 10/10

I don’t really know if this game qualifies as having a story or not, really. The minister of health has elected you, wisely or otherwise, to run a hospital as you see fit. It’s really not that much of a story, but it’s the only game I’ve ever played where you get to run a hospital, so I give it points for originality. You pretty much write the story as you go along: Will you succeeded and squeeze your patients for huge sums of money toward a wealthy retirement, or will you be destroyed by poor management, debt, and scandal, left pinching pennies in the gutters of the city slums? It’s all up to you, of course. This kind of open ended gameplay also scores high points from me. I don’t always like being told what to do, or how to do it. A very fun premise overall.

Gameplay 8/10

This game is very easy to work with as far as the interface is concerned. It doesn’t take long to learn, and you’ll be building your first hospital moments after you start the game. There’s a tutorial mode that allows you to jump right in and start building without the tedium of reading an instruction manual (who actually reads those things besides when looking for good bathroom reading?), and initially, designing your haven for the sick and…uh…deformed…will be a fairly simple task. You are given certain types of rooms you can place in your hospital initially, designed to diagnose and treat different kinds of illnesses. As time goes on, you will discover new conditions (this is my favorite part), and, hopefully, learn to treat them. You also get to hire staff, selected from a pool of skilled (or otherwise) candidates, and the cost of hiring them is proportional to their skill sets. If you manage your resources and hospital well enough over time, you will be offered promotions and chances to move on to different hospitals that offer new challenges and higher wages. The challenge does indeed increase as time goes on. When you get to the higher levels, you will experience fun things like earthquakes that damage or destroy your cure equipment, epidemics that infect people and draw huge fines (unless you can cover them up), and a host of other unpleasant realities. My favorite part about this game is seeing patients with new and weird kinds of ailments (maybe there’s something of a sadist in me), although you can’t see physical manifestations of many of the diseases you’ll treat, many of them look quite hilarious, especially the Hairyitis disease, which makes the afflicted patients look like sasquatches. There are no real diseases featured in this game, which is good, because you can manage to play this game forever without dealing with the reality of real life illness, etc.The down side to discovering patients with new and exotic conditions is that it requires new and exotic equipment to cure them, which is usually costly and takes forever to research. The only thing that frustrates me a little is that as you move to each new level, all of the conditions and cure equipment you discovered at the previous level are completely forgotten, and must be discovered all over again. I rated this game less than a “10” also because there comes a point when the game becomes almost too difficult to be fun anymore, which is sad, because by that point you still haven’t seen everything there is to see, and you don’t get time to enjoy the scenery anymore when you’re frantically checking all of your machines to repair them before the next earthquake, or trying to vaccinate all the contagious patients before they escape the hospital. Still, there’s a ton of fun to be had here, and it’s that type that, since this game is different every time you play it, never really goes away. An original and fun concept with only minor flaws.

Graphics 10/10

Bullfrog did quite an admirable job in the graphics department. I’ve never seen any of it’s other “Theme” games, but the characters and environments looks colorful and cartoony, yet realistic at the same time. The cartoony visuals, of course, help keep us from taking this game seriously in spite of it’s “theme”. They’ve somehow managed to make it laugh out loud funny when a sick patient pukes in your hallway then falls flat on his face and floats away as an angel. There’s not really much more to say. This game is very visually appealing, which, of course, is very important for a game you’ll wind up playing 8 hours straight only to take a short food break and hop back on again. Very nice to look at.

Sound 8/10

Not bad for MIDI music. The tunes get stuck in your head after a while, and you probably won’t even notice the music after putting some hours into this game. The voices are clear and easy to understand (in spite of the British accent), and the coughing, sneezing, puking, and other noises, such as patients knocking on doors and toilets flushing, all sound exactly like what they’re supposed to be. This game sounds good, and that’s about all I can say about this.

Even though I’ve owned this game for years, I still manage to keep on coming back to it. Why? Well, mainly because I haven’t ever won it yet, and I keep on coming back to prove myself to it. Also, there’s a lot to see, and I still haven’t seen it all, so the replay value hasn’t run out yet. Whether you’re a first time player, just getting your well-scrubbed hands dirty, or a seasoned veteran who just can’t stay out of the hallowed halls of healing, one thing is for sure. Theme Hospital is a challenging, fun game, that will keep you in stitches! I’d prescribe it to anyone!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/28/03, Updated 05/28/03