Theme Hospital has a strong start, but the heavy bugs and flaws start to show in the mid-game, and by the last few stages it becomes pure torture.
Here's a list of problems I had with the game:
-Epidemics and Earthquakes can happen literally right after another. I'm not sure if that's intended or not, but the requirements needed to make sure each one doesn't screw you over is a pain in the ass to do twice in a row, or even more times. And for epidemics, something I know isn't intended is that if a patient leaves one building, even if it's just to walk to another, the timer instantly goes down and the health inspector comes. This can leave you with no time to solve the epidemic just because of bad luck. And weirdly, both epidemics and emergencies can just...stop happening in the middle of a stage. I have no idea why.
-The training room, which becomes pretty vital in later stages, takes way too long to train doctors, even if you only leave a couple in there. This can become a problem as you unlock new rooms faster than you can train new doctors, and the game only really throws low level doctors that you can hire after the first year or so. You could hire as many consultants as you can in that first year, but since that's when money is such a scarce resource it often leads to a declining bank balance that causes you to lose the game at the end of said year.
-You can't turn the camera at all. To be fair stages are naturally set-up so that rooms can be placed neatly in the static view, however objects like chairs and radiators are hard to deal when they're out of view. Also you can't zoom in or out, and the default zoom is quite close for the bigger levels that'll have you scrolling across like 8 different buildings
-You get useless advice. Like "Your machines are starting to fall apart" with no info on WHICH machines it is, so you'll be forced to slowly and manually check every machine, sometimes even more if you have multiple of certain rooms. Or you'll even get "Patients are fed up about the way you run your hospital" with no specific info, despite your approval being far into the green bar.
-I was CONSTANTLY told I had too many doctors and/or nurses, but the PA was always saying "doctor needed in such and such" room, and patients leaving the hospital due to being fed up and waiting too long. WHICH IS IT, GAME?
-Later levels take waaaaaay too long. At some point you'll have built all the rooms you can and have met the general requirements for completion and just need to meet the cash requirement. This involves you doing nothing but mindlessly scrolling through the same spots checking all machines and maybe replacing ones getting low on strength. It's very dull.
-Mixed with the above, having to re-set up the exact same rooms and stuff every stage gets boring. The strategy to beat every single stage is the same regardless of the map layout. While it may take a few stages to get used to a good formula, once you get it down it just becomes a mindless task with each new level adding only 1 new room you need to place, but that works like any other room. I think the only difference I ever made as I progressed was placing more GP offices as they were the most important and visited rooms, and more pharmacies and psychiatrists since they dealt with so many of the list of illnesses, while other rooms specified in a single one.
The good things I can say about the game are that the music is fun, the graphics are simple and cartoony which helped them age well, and the management system, when it wasn't bugging the hell out, was simple enough to grasp, but deep enough to take some time to learn how to optimise it (e.g placing room equipment in a way that patients would spend the less time in there, making nurse rooms close together so they wouldn't have to walk far when called into another room).
I played this for the nostalgia, and I got a lovely dose of it at the beginning. But by the end I was forcing myself to play for completions sake.
Here's a list of problems I had with the game:
-Epidemics and Earthquakes can happen literally right after another. I'm not sure if that's intended or not, but the requirements needed to make sure each one doesn't screw you over is a pain in the ass to do twice in a row, or even more times. And for epidemics, something I know isn't intended is that if a patient leaves one building, even if it's just to walk to another, the timer instantly goes down and the health inspector comes. This can leave you with no time to solve the epidemic just because of bad luck. And weirdly, both epidemics and emergencies can just...stop happening in the middle of a stage. I have no idea why.
-The training room, which becomes pretty vital in later stages, takes way too long to train doctors, even if you only leave a couple in there. This can become a problem as you unlock new rooms faster than you can train new doctors, and the game only really throws low level doctors that you can hire after the first year or so. You could hire as many consultants as you can in that first year, but since that's when money is such a scarce resource it often leads to a declining bank balance that causes you to lose the game at the end of said year.
-You can't turn the camera at all. To be fair stages are naturally set-up so that rooms can be placed neatly in the static view, however objects like chairs and radiators are hard to deal when they're out of view. Also you can't zoom in or out, and the default zoom is quite close for the bigger levels that'll have you scrolling across like 8 different buildings
-You get useless advice. Like "Your machines are starting to fall apart" with no info on WHICH machines it is, so you'll be forced to slowly and manually check every machine, sometimes even more if you have multiple of certain rooms. Or you'll even get "Patients are fed up about the way you run your hospital" with no specific info, despite your approval being far into the green bar.
-I was CONSTANTLY told I had too many doctors and/or nurses, but the PA was always saying "doctor needed in such and such" room, and patients leaving the hospital due to being fed up and waiting too long. WHICH IS IT, GAME?
-Later levels take waaaaaay too long. At some point you'll have built all the rooms you can and have met the general requirements for completion and just need to meet the cash requirement. This involves you doing nothing but mindlessly scrolling through the same spots checking all machines and maybe replacing ones getting low on strength. It's very dull.
-Mixed with the above, having to re-set up the exact same rooms and stuff every stage gets boring. The strategy to beat every single stage is the same regardless of the map layout. While it may take a few stages to get used to a good formula, once you get it down it just becomes a mindless task with each new level adding only 1 new room you need to place, but that works like any other room. I think the only difference I ever made as I progressed was placing more GP offices as they were the most important and visited rooms, and more pharmacies and psychiatrists since they dealt with so many of the list of illnesses, while other rooms specified in a single one.
The good things I can say about the game are that the music is fun, the graphics are simple and cartoony which helped them age well, and the management system, when it wasn't bugging the hell out, was simple enough to grasp, but deep enough to take some time to learn how to optimise it (e.g placing room equipment in a way that patients would spend the less time in there, making nurse rooms close together so they wouldn't have to walk far when called into another room).
I played this for the nostalgia, and I got a lovely dose of it at the beginning. But by the end I was forcing myself to play for completions sake.