Two Point Hospital

Two Point Hospital is often regarded as a “spiritual successor” to Theme Hospital because it is a modern take on the original game, and also has been worked on by some of the original developers. You manage a hospital by zoning out rooms, placing equipment, hiring and training staff. The aim is to successfully treat patients that wander in with fictional conditions. “Light Headed” patients literally have a light-bulb for a head. A machine unscrews their bulb and replaces a new human head to cure them.

Your staff include Doctors, Nurses, Assistants, and Janitors. Some medical rooms require Doctors, some require Nurses, but the Surgery requires 1 Doctor and 1 Nurse. Assistants sit at the Reception, Stalls, or the Cafe. Janitors fix machines, upgrade machines, pick up rubbish, fill vending machines, water plants, empty bins, operate fire extinguishers and deal with dead patients. When patients die, they turn into a ghost and start scaring everyone. A janitor trained in Ghost Capture, can whip out a vacuum and suck them up Luigi’s Mansion-style.

There’s loads of missions where you build up your hospital from scratch (or have a few basic rooms already). Over several missions, the game introduces you to new diseases and their respective rooms/machinery/staff that can deal with them.

Your hospital is graded between 1-3 stars, and you need to obtain 1 star to move onto the next mission. You can return to any hospital at any point to aim to improve your rating. The requirements to obtain a star differ from mission to mission.

Most missions start with one building, but you can purchase the surrounding plots of land. When you do, the walls are constructed for you, and you just have to purchase and place the rooms. Many buildings have fairly awkward layouts, so they aren’t simply a basic rectangle.

It is fairly easy to zone out rooms. Once you select the room type, you click and drag to zone out an area. Each room has a minimum size like 3x3, 3x4 etc, and the colour will change from red to blue to show that you have the required size. Once placed, you then are required to place the mandatory equipment which is auto selected for you. From there, you can place optional equipment, and click the Tick button to instantly construct the room.

You don’t need to make an even layout, so can make really awkwardly sized rooms. A 3x3 room could be placed as rows of 3, 5, 4. The larger the room, the higher prestige, so you may want to optimise space, whilst trying to make the rooms as large as possible.

Placing optional items also increases prestige and may give some other bonus. A coffee maker can fulfil your staff members thirst need. These optional items are unlocked via Kudosh which is acquired by completing optional objectives, or generated in the Research lab.

You can edit the room at any time to resize it, or even pick up the room and place it somewhere else - free of charge. You will be doing this a lot as your hospital scales because you need to buy new plots of land, optimise space usage, and try and minimise the distance your patients/staff need to walk between rooms.

Staff work shifts, and will venture to your staff room to rest before returning to work. You can go into the menu and choose which staff are allowed to work in which rooms. Some rooms require a certain qualification, whereas others are optional. Any Doctor can work in the GP Office, but Doctors can also have a GP skill which boosts their effectiveness. So you may add that restriction yourself, so only staff with the bonus work there. Doctors must have a Research skill before they can work in the Research Lab.

As staff work, they gain experience and are rated 1-5 stars to show their expertise. At each star, they can obtain a perk which they obtain by sending them to the Training Room. I always liked to have a training course going on at all times. I found that either my hospital needed to scale, so I hired more staff, or they were learning and had free skill slots available. Training up staff yourself tends to be cheaper, but staff still expect wages rises when promoted. Training seems a very important part of the game.

The missions had the same general structure. You place GP Offices, some diagnostic rooms such as General Diagnostic, Cardiology, then a Pharmacy to cure them. After a while, a patient will come in with a more interesting illness, at which point you will build that special room. As your reputation grows and more patients come in, you may need more GP Offices and diagnostic rooms to keep up with the demand.

Each mission had a different proportion of illnesses. So there may be missions where no one suffers from a “Jest Infection”, but other missions may focus on it, so you end up having 2 or 3 of the same room to treat it. There were a few missions that had a massive restriction. I liked the one where you couldn’t hire skilled staff, so you had to hire loads of 1-star Juniors and send them to the training room to up-skill them. The missions often made you change up your strategy at least slightly, so they didn’t feel repetitive.

Money is often quite tight and you will be making decisions of when to hire new staff, how much you can afford in wages, if you can afford to throw money at optional decorations, if you really need a duplicate room etc. The worst thing is when a patient wanders in with a condition you cannot treat. Do you send them home, or take out a loan?

There are 3 loans you can take out, 50k, 100k, 250k at 5%, 10% and 15% interest respectively. You don’t have to take the full amount, there is a slider you can adjust, although there is a minimum. So the big loan has a minimum of 150k. Taking out the big loan can be risky, especially if you have the other loans as well since the interest rate then becomes a burden. If you have enough money to pay off the loan in full, then you can do so, but you cannot repay part of it.

Once you get midway through the game, I found I was constantly taking out loans. I often felt I was spending money I had on new rooms and staff, so didn’t have a chance to stockpile much cash. So when someone wanders in that needs a room that I don’t have and it costs 50k to place, then it was time for a loan. If I had run out of space, then I used the bigger loans to purchase the land then place the new room.

The number of patients in your hospital can be insane, and it can be hard to deal with. Patient’s health will decrease over time, so if their condition isn’t diagnosed then cured quickly enough, then they will die. When patients die, your reputation does decrease and the reputation affects the number of patients that comes through the door. So if you are struggling, it should start to scale down.

There’s 3 game speeds; slow, normal and fast, and you can pause the game. The range of zoom is good, and can pan and tilt the camera to get a good look around your hospital.

I felt Two Point Hospital took the classic game Theme Hospital and successfully expanded/modernised it. It simultaneously felt nostalgic and new, and was highly addictive. Most games will start to drag way before 15 hours, but I managed to put 65 hours into this. There’s plenty of missions, plenty of challenge, and plenty of fun. I absolutely loved it.