Two Point Hospital is a single player hospital management simulator made by Two Point Studios and published by SEGA. Your goal in the game is to try and build a successful and profitable hospital empire. Build rooms, place furniture and wacky machines, hire staff and cure every patient that walks through those hospital doors. The game is available on PC, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PS4. It is currently priced at AUS$55.
You are put in full control of constructing a hospital, with some empty buildings for you to construct rooms in. After placing down a reception, the first and most thing to build first is the GP office, for a doctor needs to figure out what illness or injury a person has. If they don’t know what it is, the person will be sent to a diagnostic room such as an x-ray or a cardio test and come back to the GP’s office to see if their issue can be diagnosed again. After diagnosis is complete, they will be sent to the correct room for their treatment.
There are so many unique illnesses inside of Two Point County, the imaginary place Two Point Hospital is set in, from lightheadedness (having a head that is literally a lightbulb), to Mock Star (believing that you are Elvis Presley and dressing up as him), to Grey Anatomy (Having all the colour removed from your body and being entirely grey). Note that not all staff are able to treat illnesses, some rooms require staff to have certain training in a classroom before they are able to work in them. The wacky and funny illnesses that patients have in this game really helps steer the game away from being a dark and sad hospital game and makes the game more fun and interesting.
But there is more to the game than just building diagnosis rooms and treatment rooms. Patients have their own needs that need to be dealt with, consisting of thirst, hunger, comfort, boredom and the need to use a toilet. These needs must be dealt with to avoid patients leaving and ruining your hospitals reputation, so building bathrooms, placing vending machines and benches, and giving your patients things to do is very important. You also need to worry about things like decoration and temperature or else patient’s happiness will drop, as well as good hygiene since bad hygiene causes a patient’s health to go down fast. If a patient doesn’t get treatment before their health reaches zero or if their treatment fails, they die, ruining your hospital’s reputation, as well as possibly becoming a ghost and scaring other patients and staff. Reputation affects the rate of new patients entering your hospital, and higher reputation means more patients will decide to visit your hospital.
Staffing your hospital is obviously a big factor – you can’t run a hospital without any staff! Doctors are obviously needed for things like the GP’s office, a couple of the diagnosis rooms and most of the treatment rooms. Nurses help with some of the diagnosis rooms and some of the treatment rooms. Janitors clean up your hospital, repair machines used for curing patients, and some of them can catch ghosts if you are unlucky enough to have patients die in your hospital. Assistants work in places like the reception and the newsagent to help patients. Staff have their own special perks, such as being better at diagnosis, having more energy, or learning how to use different treatment machines. Some staff start with abilities when you hire them, but if you want to unlock more abilities for your staff, a classroom will be needed to train them. Staff also have special traits that can be either positive or negative, such as being motivated, fast at learning, stupid, or lazy. Staff also have needs like patients do, as well as energy which can be dealt with by building a staff room.
For each level, you are given objectives to complete in order to unlock the next level. These objectives could be training staff, treating specific illnesses, earning reputation, or anything really. After gaining one star (completing the first set of objectives), you are given the option to continue the level you are on and complete more difficult objectives for a second or third star, or just move on to the next level. Earning stars will reward your hospital empire with Kudosh, a special currency used for unlocking new items and decorations. If you end up wanting to go back to a previous hospital to earn more stars, you can do so at any time.
One connection that I – and many other people – can make between Two Point Hospital and another game is with Theme Hospital. While Theme Hospital is a lot older, there is still a very clear chain linking these two games together. The graphics still look similar despite Theme Hospital being quite pixelated, the games feature the same staff, building rooms and placing objects feel the same in both games, and they both feature the same great humor. Of course, then Two Point Hospital added some improvements, such as the graphics obviously being upgraded, unlocked things from research being unlocked in other hospitals, the gender barrier behind different staff roles being removed, and the levels being more difficult. So, these two games feature their own differences, but the core mechanics of Theme Hospital stay present in Two Point Hospital, which is why the game is so often called a sequel to Theme Hospital.
I think that Two Point Hospital does its job at being the “sequel” to the 1997 game Theme Hospital, but I think more work could have been done to make building rooms less clunky and make the two-star objectives and three-star objectives less about grinding and optimization. Overall, Two Point Hospital is not a bad game, and I would say that most people should give it a crack as the funny graphics and sounds as well as the interesting core mechanics are good at making you ignore the annoying aspects of the game.
