Review: Is Two Point Hospital the Management Game You’ve Been Waiting for?
Egyptian Mummies are flooding the hospital waiting area, the clown clinic has been struck by lightning, and it’s panic stations all round as doctors rush to treat an outbreak of the Abominable Curse that is spreading through the hospital like wildfire. To add insult to injury, the mayor has just announced he’s popping in for a quick inspection, which means my janitors are working overtime to ensure the place is ready for the big arrival. Running a hospital is messy business and chaos is the order of the day in Two Point Hospital, where outrageous disasters wait in the wings, ready to ruin your day at any given moment.
If your real-life job is all about putting out fires, then you might not find the chaos of Two Point Hospital as entertaining as most, but there’s no question about it, Two Point Hospital is a medical marvel. Even if you’re not a fan of the management genre, this enchanting game is well worth playing just for the laughs. For those who played the classic hospital management game, Theme Hospital, over two decades ago, its spiritual successor, Two Point Hospital offers a generous dose of nostalgia that will take you right back to your childhood.
The management-style game is made up of various hospitals, each with its own unique set of challenges and goals, but Two Point Hospital has one clear goal throughout — cure as many people as you can. Achieving this goal, and a list of other objectives, at each hospital will help you earn star ratings to allow you to unlock new room types, discover new illnesses, and of course, move onto your next hospital mission. Objectives include anything from making the hospital look more appealing to maintaining a high reputation level and keeping your patient death rates low.
Earning your star ratings and curing patients is a delicate balance as the number of deaths directly affects your hospital’s reputation, which is essential in attracting top-quality hospital staff and patients with big budgets. Initially, the juggling of tasks is kept to a minimum because there are only a few ailments that need your attention. You’ll start out small with only a single hospital and a handful of illnesses to worry about treating and slowly build your way up towards managing larger locations with multiple buildings and a whole new set of challenges to take on. Later missions prove to be increasingly challenging resulting in star ratings being more and more difficult to achieve.
With loads of careful planning and all-sorts of graphs and Excel sheets to keep you busy, this game is an A-type personality’s dream come true. But it’s also a great game for those who prefer more surface-level management games. The beauty if Two Point Hospital is you can make it as detailed as you like. If you’re a planner, then you can choose to dive deep into the inner workings of your hospital’s finances, staff morale, patient health levels, and more to carefully craft a hospital Doogie Howser, M.D would be proud to work in. If all that’s a bit too much for you, then you can simply choose to solve the more straight-forward goals set out for you on each level so you can earn those much-coveted star ratings and be on your way.
While the game’s management format can all seem a little serious at times, Two Point Hospital’s goofy style and colourful characters bring a sense of humour to the management simulation, finding a good balance between both aspects. This delicate balance is a hard thing to achieve in a management game and while many games with a similar mechanic tend to become mundane, offering more of the same with each new level, Two Point Hospital keeps things interesting by giving you just enough ‘new stuff’ and challenges along the way to keep you wanting more.
Owing to its incredible success back in 1997, it’s quite unfathomable that it’s taken so long for a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital to arrive but now that it’s here it’s been well worth the wait. Two Point Hospital does an excellent job of reworking an old formula into something fresh, modern and engaging without losing the charm of the original title.
I reviewed Two Point Hospital on PC but the game is also available on Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
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