Two Point Hospital review: It’s 21 years since Theme Hospital came out, but is the hospital management game as enjoyably daft as it used to be?
It’s 21 years since gamers fell for the cutesy animation and irreverent humour of bizarro business sim Theme Hospital. Now its designers have returned with a ‘spiritual sequel’, Two Point Hospital, “Where 52 per cent of patients believe they leave healthier than they enter”.
And while it retains the nostalgic charm of the original, it’s updated with some wicked satire of millennial culture, with your patients described as “selfie-taking chumps” who present with illnesses such as Verbal Diarrhoea and Emperor Complex. Gone is the 8-bit music, replaced by a hospital radio station hosted by a Nick Grimshaw parody DJ playing chart-toppers like “I Whisper to Fish”.
Most modern hospital trusts are in debt – now you can be too! You don’t automatically lose the game if you go into the red at the end of the year, with the option to take out a loan, complete with varying APRs and early repayment options. As your medical empire grows, you can build unsightly hospitals next to international landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge and Stonehenge.
While the new crop of meta-diseases are witty, they lack the simple gross-out humour of the original’s Bloaty Head or Slack Tongue
Two Point gives the player far more agency than the original. Rather than waiting for a faceless bureaucrat to send you a letter to progress to the next level, you must simply complete a series of objectives. These can be met at a one, two or three star rating; if you want to move on after one star, you can, but if the thought of leaving things incomplete haunts your every waking moment, you can hang around until you’ve maxed things out.
While these updates are welcome, the hospital management business remains very, very repetitive. Too many minutes are wasted at the start of each level placing receptions and GP surgeries before you can even think about researching cures to new illnesses. And while the new crop of meta-diseases are witty, they lack the simple gross-out humour of the original’s Bloaty Head or Slack Tongue.
Two Point Studios has created a pacier, more exciting game that will appeal to a more sophisticated audience. But older players are likely to look back at the original with rose-tinted glasses, longing for those lo-fi corridors splattered with pixilated puke.