Hospital Tycoon maintains a lot of gameplay features from many preexisting lifestyle simulation games, with there being an importance on creating accessible locations for your characters to work, forming and breaking relationships and – in the case of this game – making an effective hospital that helps your patients stay in well working order. Probably one game that Hospital Tycoon closely resembles is the cult-favourite Theme Hospital. However, one major aspect of Hospital Tycoon that sets it a part from Theme Hospital is that the game is played out much like a cheesy soap opera, featuring backstabbing plots, evil villains and plenty of romance.
Helloooo nurse!
The soap structure of the game injects some much-needed innovation into the genre, and will likely draw a new crowd to the game just to see how this particular ‘soap’ develops. The story is told over three seasons, and will be split into four episodes per a season. The most enjoyable aspect of this mode is that you are in control of how the ‘show’ develops. Early on you’ll be able to perform training-based objectives to help kick-start your hospital, though you’ll later be given open-ended story-based objectives that’ll help develop certain character relationships and the hospital itself.
If the soap opera story mode isn’t your type of thing, then there’s always the typical sandbox mode where you are given the freedom to do as you please. While this mode wasn’t playable in the build available to us, it’ll no doubt be similar to other lifestyle simulation games such as The Sims and will likely be the main mode where gamers will spend most of their time as they attempt to create their very own state-of-the-art hospital.
The charm of Hospital Tycoon is largely drawn from its tongue in cheek attitude, which is shown particularly from the game’s fictional conditions that you’ll have to treat throughout the game. From what we could tell from the preview build, there will be 30 different illnesses that you’ll need to treat in some form, though being a preview build the developers may still have a few more ideas left to incorporate before the game is released. A few conditions that sparked our interest were: Lycanthropic, where the patient acts like a werewolf and runs around the hospital biting other patients and medical staff; Tyred, which is a condition where the patient has large tyre tracks running down their entire body, including their face; and Mummifried which is a condition where the skin turns into hardened scaly armour due to too much exposure to the sun. The comedy is further cemented by the way you will need to treat your patients too. To cure the condition ‘Mummifried’ you’ll need to run your patient through an acid shower to get rid of that nasty scaly skin.
If the distinguishable letters on the building didn't give it away, you make hospitals in this game.
Of course, discovering the cure for a certain disease is also beneficial to your hospital, providing additional funds and making your hospital a top choice for ill patients. You’ll need to invest money into new equipment and drugs, as well as train staff members correctly to ensure that hospital efficiency is well up there. It’s also important to correctly pair nurses and doctors that have good relationships with one another and have similar opinions and qualities, as this will often help reduce operation times and help to develop cures much faster.
Besides forming relationships, acting out your soap and curing diseases, Hospital Tycoon also allows you to design the layout of your hospital. You’ll be able to easily distinguish rooms by placing operation tables, workbenches, computers and even more leisurely items such as pinball machines and televisions for a staff room. An effective layout also helps patients come in and out in a more timely fashion.
Hospital Tycoon is developing into a must-own title for lifestyle simulation fans, and will likely sit well with new gamers to the genre largely thanks to its intriguing soap opera game structure – ensuring that those silly Brits will fall in love with the game instantly; they are obsessed with Neighbours after all. Hospital Tycoon will be available in June.
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