Two Point Hospital Review

Since the ’90s, management sims have been a popular choice due to the sheer addictive gameplay associated with it, in addition to the satisfaction that comes with successfully managing whatever it is you’d be managing, be it a theme park or an entire city. To this day, management sims seem to be on the rise and have also made their way onto consoles. One such title is Two Point Hospital,  a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, which features cleaner visuals and maintains the charm of the original game.

The game’s premise is simple; you are tasked with overhauling and renovating a number of different hospitals in Two Point County. From the structure itself to the different staff you hire and their calibre, it all forms part of the job. Like many other management sims, it’s never just that simple though. You’ll be faced with a number of challenges you’ll need to overcome in order to maintain and increase the hospital’s reputation.

Two Point Hospital’s patients and their respective maladies are pretty much all comedic in nature ranging from Lightheadedness (patients have an actual lightbulb where their heads should be) to Mock Star (patients take on a hilarious Freddie Mercury appearance). It’s not only the illness that’s hilarious though, even the respective treatments are fairly odd and are pretty funny to witness.

When starting the game, you’re thrown right into a tutorial of sorts but also acts as the first mission. After completing this basic but pretty informative mission, you’re able to move onto to other facilities to continue with overhauling. Each mission presents new challenges and while it will borrow some elements from the previous challenge, you’ll learn something new and will have to put it into action. Not only this, but locations vary in size and due to this, you’ll end up with so many moving parts. It’s actually pretty fun to be involved with so many aspects of running the hospital, but some of the tasks appear more than once, leading to a bit of repetition. Something important to note is that the Sandbox Mode and Superbug Initiative was not available on the console version at launch, but it was announced to be released on 31 March 2020.

Two Point Hospital provides a fair challenge. It’s not one that will have you stressed out over how to handle certain situations since there’s enough wiggle room for mistakes. It’s possible to come back from almost any decision that doesn’t pan out. It’s quite friendly to newcomers to the management sim genre in that regard, however, I can imagine how it might be too easy for longtime players.

Making the transition from PC to PS4 seems to have been mostly seamless. My one fear heading into the game was that using a controller wasn’t going to be as smooth as playing with a keyboard and mouse. I was pleasantly surprised when I actually started playing and it was incredibly easy to get the hang of moving rotating the camera and taking control of items or staff in the hospital. Even navigating the various menus is pretty snappy.

Performance-wise, Two Point Hospital didn’t really give me any issues except for maybe some lengthy loading screens. Other users have reported issues with the console version where a bug has corrupted they’re save file, forcing them to start over. This never affected me, but I can understand how frustrating it must be to lose all of your progress. A patch is reportedly coming soon but an exact date has not yet been confirmed.

Two Point Hospital looks good on console. Sure, it’s not as polished as its PC counterpart, but it’s still pretty nice to look at. More importantly, the design of the characters and the hospital is quite reminiscent of the original Theme Hospital. However, the character design especially reminded me of the art style used in popular claymation series, Wallace and Gromit. The announcements that play during the game are also excellent and are dripping with sarcasm and the game’s signature humour.

Two Point Hospital is a great port. It may have some bugs and features some repetition, but it is still such an enjoyable management sim and a decent spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. The somewhat long loading screens can be a bit of a slight annoyance, but once you get into the game, the humour and charming style more than makeup for it. Two Point Hospital is a solid port and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Two Point Hospital is available on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC

This review is based upon the PS4 version of the game

Grab your copy of the game here https://store.playstation.com/en-gb/product/EP0177-CUSA15884_00-TWOPOINTHOSPITAL

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