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Two Point Hospital - Theme Hospital spiritual successor

Space Satan

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Marvellous
1535576185071.png
 

Tigranes

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Jan 8, 2009
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Yeah, denuvo has me waiting to pull the trigger. Sigh. I don't know how annoying it is these days, but what a stupid decision.

It'll probably take people some hours until we can tell how shallow the game is or whether the gameplay loop has some longevity.
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
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Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Tried it for an hour. Was not feeling it at all so requested a refund. For me this is one of those nostalgia things that should remain in your head as a memory only. The animations are nice though.
 

mwnn85

Savant
Joined
Aug 14, 2017
Messages
210
  • Crappy generic art style, none of the charm the original game
  • Very short and easy campaign
  • No sandbox
  • No multiplayer
  • Denuvo
  • Unity 3D so probably garbage performance and no mods

:decline:
That's disappointing but it's not unexpected.
There's a couple of improvements like the free rotation & free placement of items (over the grid system with two orientations)
But I thought the whole thing might end up being soulless.

I wonder who leaked it for it to get cracked a day before the official release.
The Linux build isn't even starting up apparently.

There's been very little released this year which has met expectations.
:dead:

Hope the Wasteland remaster and Phoenix Point don't go tits up.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.pcgamesn.com/two-point-hospital/two-point-hospital-review

Two Point Hospital review
Can we give Two Point Hospital, the spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, a clean bill of health?

Another day, another hospital. Before anything else, I need to build a reception desk so I can check in the horde of patients pressing against the doors, flinging snot and disease into the morning air. After that it’ll be time to build another GP’s office. How many of these have I built now? I’ve lost count. The room needs to be at least four squares by three, have a door, a desk, and a filing cabinet. Do I have the money to add any extras to it? Right now I do, but further down the line I know I’ll regret buying that yucca plant.

Two Point Hospital has been built by people who made some of my favourite games when I was younger. We’re talking Black & White, Fable, and – of course, the connoisseur’s choice – The Movies. This new game of theirs takes heavily from their work on Theme Hospital, it being a hospital management sim after all, and wonderfully it has all the modern doodads such a reimagination should. Beyond the fantastic art style, Two Point Hospital has granular management menus that are reminiscent of those found in Planet Coaster, which means they appeal to my need to fiddle with, well, everything.

However, while you have the option to customise every facet of your buildings – similar to Theme Hospital – there’s room to add add more convenience. Specifically, it would be great if Two Point Hospital gave you access to premade rooms. It quickly becomes tiring having to choose and position each individual component of a room so that, with every new hospital, you have to recreate the same hospital basics. The GP’s office is always at least four by three squares so the absence of a premade option is frustrating. I’d create the damn blueprint myself if I was able.



two-point-hospital-light-headedness.png


Where Two Point Hospital shines like one of the polished white tiles adorning my wards is in how it makes hospital staff feel like actual humans. They plead when you threaten to fire them and have conversations in hallways rather than walk like robots between patients. The hiring process is one of my favourite parts of the game – choosing which candidate has the best qualifications while also considering their temperament and various positive or negative traits. For example, Dr. Victoria Bolognese is motivated and tireless, so she’s an obvious hire, whereas Aldo Codswallop is nausea inducing, hangry, and swallows his gum – need I say more?

The dry British humour on display in those names carries over to the radio presenters and tannoy announcers of your hospital. But while it’s funny and cute to begin with, after you hear the same announcement for the 30th time, their voices soon wear thin. “We’re sorry for the litter that you dropped on our floor,” the tannoy sounds off, but I stopped laughing at that joke several hours ago. Fortunately, when you’re so engrossed in planning and decision-making, you might not notice some of the repetition.



Once you get back to a straight face you can refocus on the task of getting your hospital to at least a one star rating – this unlocks the next level, and gets you a few bonuses for doing so. There are many challenges to complete in order to get a one star hospital, and on top of that sometimes your staff ask more of you, too. Oh, you want a staff room with a prestige of four, do you Nigella Findlater? Well, did you consider that maybe we’re in dire need of a room to save people with Jest Infections? The staff challenges aren’t of the utmost importance, but they do highlight where your hospital needs improving, which offers a little useful direction.

Repetitive building aside, Two Point Hospital manages to make each level feel fresh by giving you new challenges, new ailments, extreme weather, natural disasters, and new areas of research. The hospital named Melt Downs, for instance, gives you an abandoned old facility, with rubbish strewn all over the place, broken machines, and unpredictable weather. However, my favourite has to be Duckworth-Upon-Bilge, where you take over a public hospital under the strapped-for-cash Two Point Health Service. This one starts with many pre-built rooms – I’m a fan already – but the catch is, you don’t make money from diagnosing, treating, or mistreating patients. This is better for my moral wellbeing – I felt bad having to increase my prices to cover the costs of running my hospital – but it did mean I was relying on the health minister to pay up when we completed his extra challenges.



Like Theme Hospital before it, much of Two Point Hospital’s entertainment comes from its outlandish ailments. At one point, my staff demanded I shoot the monobeasts – the monobrows of infected patients – infesting my hospital while I was dealing with an outbreak of Ancient Egyptian mummies. If nothing else, they represent a horrible waste of bandages.

With 15 hospitals to play through to three stars, Two Point Hospital finds plenty of reasons for you to start again from scratch as you learn of new ailments, find new ways to cure, and unlock new decorations for your hospital. Additional strategy comes from the fact that each hospital is connected – as such, it’s worth keeping one hospital as a place of research so its teachings can be spread across your whole organisation. It’s a shame you can’t similarly transfer the knowledge of how to build a GP’s office between hospitals, of course, but I’ve dealt with that by learning to construct them in less than 30 seconds. UI gripes aside, Two Point Hospital is a fitting successor to Theme Hospital, even if a few health checks are still required.

Two Point Hospital review
After years of waiting for a game to capture the same joy of Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital arrives as an able successor. Although, two decades on we'd hoped it wouldn't share the same flaws.

7/10
 
Last edited:

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Can't go wrong with CorsixTH if you want to play classic Theme Hospital without dosbox and optional quality of life features like higher resolution support.

Prison Architect is good too if you're not put off by the art style.

 

Alfgart

Augur
Patron
Joined
Feb 7, 2006
Messages
390
Divinity: Original Sin 2
I'm playing the "free no-Denuvo" version. For reference, I've always enjoyed tycoon/management games (Startopia, Evil Genius, RC2, Prison Architect, ....)
Game so far is pretty fun and charming. Thanks to its simple art style the game runs on potato-PCs, and there is lots of nice animations and little details (characters can interact with almost every object you place). The management aspect is not so simple because each staff has different traits, personalities and qualifications, and you have to constantly check their mood, wages, and so on.
Sandbox mode is kinda unnecesary because every "mission" is in a different hospital, but you can return to an already played one anytime, and continue playing it forever, even with the new unlocked tech of more advanced missions.

Recommended. People saying it's bad go suck a dick
 

laclongquan

Arcane
Joined
Jan 10, 2007
Messages
1,870,144
Location
Searching for my kidnapped sister
The mechanics of Theme Hospital is great, but what make it top of the pyramid is the humour. Same deal with Startopia.

And humour is hard to replicate.

So many games have replicated the mechanics of TH and/or Startopia over the years. None can do the humour~
 

Mazisky

Magister
Joined
Mar 8, 2015
Messages
2,082
Location
Rome, IT
I like the game, but i would buy it anyway because i wanna support the devs intention of making many tycoon games in the next years.
 

Space Satan

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It feels exactly like that but along with that it feels that it is lacking improvement. Plus the most adequate review is this from my experience:
As of writing this review, there is a serious issue with the way the game's AI handles queues and diagnosis percentage per visit. For example, many people are finding themselves building 7/8+ GP offices - which are unable to diagnose patients adequately, resulting in unmanageable queues. Patients are also constantly referred back to the GP office, until they reach a 100% diagnosis (especially if you lack more advanced diagnosis rooms). Many things also distract patients from going to diagnosis rooms efficiently. They regularly get up to satisfy their hunger, thirst, entertainment and bathroom needs. This leaves doctors / rooms idle and stalls queues even further. When your hospital begins imploding because of this and your death rate spirals, ghosts will also disrupt your queues and make the situation become completely unmanageable. Building additional rooms, training staff to the max level, the perfect layout - nothing seems to solve the problem. With a bottleneck in your hospital, it makes it impossible to cure patients efficiently if you can't diagnose them. Cures also equals income in this game. You'll consistently see yourself fall into the red when you feel like you've done everything right. The game also provides you with no obvious solutions and this severly hinders progression (it gets worse every level).

The way the game handles reputation is also broken and exacerbates the above issue. Hospital reputation is responsible for the amount of patients who visit your hospital. If you enjoy building as much as possible in advance and planning your layout, the game will swamp you with more patients than you can handle and doom you to fail. The bar raises to maximum level ridiculously fast. It's also very difficult to get your reputation to go back down, and deaths barely seem to effect it as of now. Your only option is to build very slowly and barely decorate to keep the bar low and control patient numbers, which is extremely counterintuitive.

Other quality of life fixes that are needed would be the ability to create room templates. If the game is going to force you to build numerous diagnosis rooms per level (literally a wing or two worth of them), it would be nice to drop them down immediately. The list / grid of items you can add to a room also gets enormous and makes the building process even more cumbersome. The game also doesn't remember the direction you're rotating items to, so having to do it manually also becomes a drag.
Queues are staggering, no amount of GP offices can handle it, in original TH several GPs could handle quite a lot of patients, but in TPH no amount of GPs can save you.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
It feels exactly like that but along with that it feels that it is lacking improvement. Plus the most adequate review is this from my experience:
As of writing this review, there is a serious issue with the way the game's AI handles queues and diagnosis percentage per visit. For example, many people are finding themselves building 7/8+ GP offices - which are unable to diagnose patients adequately, resulting in unmanageable queues. Patients are also constantly referred back to the GP office, until they reach a 100% diagnosis (especially if you lack more advanced diagnosis rooms). Many things also distract patients from going to diagnosis rooms efficiently. They regularly get up to satisfy their hunger, thirst, entertainment and bathroom needs. This leaves doctors / rooms idle and stalls queues even further. When your hospital begins imploding because of this and your death rate spirals, ghosts will also disrupt your queues and make the situation become completely unmanageable. Building additional rooms, training staff to the max level, the perfect layout - nothing seems to solve the problem. With a bottleneck in your hospital, it makes it impossible to cure patients efficiently if you can't diagnose them. Cures also equals income in this game. You'll consistently see yourself fall into the red when you feel like you've done everything right. The game also provides you with no obvious solutions and this severly hinders progression (it gets worse every level).

The way the game handles reputation is also broken and exacerbates the above issue. Hospital reputation is responsible for the amount of patients who visit your hospital. If you enjoy building as much as possible in advance and planning your layout, the game will swamp you with more patients than you can handle and doom you to fail. The bar raises to maximum level ridiculously fast. It's also very difficult to get your reputation to go back down, and deaths barely seem to effect it as of now. Your only option is to build very slowly and barely decorate to keep the bar low and control patient numbers, which is extremely counterintuitive.

Other quality of life fixes that are needed would be the ability to create room templates. If the game is going to force you to build numerous diagnosis rooms per level (literally a wing or two worth of them), it would be nice to drop them down immediately. The list / grid of items you can add to a room also gets enormous and makes the building process even more cumbersome. The game also doesn't remember the direction you're rotating items to, so having to do it manually also becomes a drag.
Queues are staggering, no amount of GP offices can handle it, in original TH several GPs could handle quite a lot of patients, but in TPH no amount of GPs can save you.
so is this game about the UK healthcare system?
 

Kwota

Augur
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Aug 11, 2009
Messages
123
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Ostfront
It feels exactly like that but along with that it feels that it is lacking improvement. Plus the most adequate review is this from my experience:

Queues are staggering, no amount of GP offices can handle it, in original TH several GPs could handle quite a lot of patients, but in TPH no amount of GPs can save you.

I just got my second star on Grockle Bay and it's not that bad, you can micromanage that shit to a certain extent (2 GP offices per lot works best).

What is way worse are patients getting lost constantly on this map - i need to restart this map for the third star because of this.
 
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
263
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I'm enjoying the game, but I can say that I feel it's cutting corners dreadfully so on the way that it presents you with difficulty via Nu-XCOM style RNG, and inundating you with sheer numbers. In the span of 30 minutes, I found myself expanding from one GP clinic to three, and that was mandatory. Unless I'm being a spastic and missing some hidden fine-control settings somewhere, the game throws a lot of unavoidable risk at you. It's less about managing the efficiency of your hospital layout (although, that's still a factor), and more just a risk of pure RNG to decide whether your diagnostics + staff treatment factors all provide enough of a total bonus towards a cure.

This is obviously fine if you prefer a type of 'fighting against the inevitable tide' style of game. I think there's a breakpoint in where you can overcome and prevent it from being unmanageably bothersome.
However, unless I'm misremembering, it's not directly like Theme Hospital, in where you had more fine control over the risks you take.

Regardless, a pleasant game, with a fantastic soundtrack.
 

Space Satan

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I just got my second star on Grockle Bay and it's not that bad, you can micromanage that shit to a certain extent (2 GP offices per lot works best).

What is way worse are patients getting lost constantly on this map - i need to restart this map for the third star because of this.
Play a while and you will find that 15 GP offices are not enough. At some point your hospital will be drowned with patients. So people on forums now devising strategies to REDUCE you hospital attractiveness because otherwise you will go to a death spiral. More GP and diag=> more attractiveness=>more people=tremendous queues in every GP, then death and angry patient spirals
 

Kwota

Augur
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Aug 11, 2009
Messages
123
Location
Ostfront
Then I must be incredibly good at this game, never have a queue to single GP longer than 7-8 with 99 hospital rep and ~80% attractiveness (two GP per lot, 2 XRays, 3 MEGA scanners, 3 DNA Clinics, 2 Fluid Accelerators, around 500-550 patients round the clock).

Grockle Bay is tenth hospital, all I do is go to patient tab, sort by health and if his diagnosis progress is over 85-90% full and if he's queuing to GP I send him straight to medication.

What pisses me off is patient AI problems: little fucker gets queued 1st to DNA clinic for a diagnosis, but he doesn't go there instead depleting his health bar in toilet or some shit, and on Grockle Bay AI goes bonkers so patient is still queued 1st for DNA clinic 500 days later.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
It's a big let down, presentation is pretty much like a phone game and its as "fun" as one . I had shivers and some unexpected dread feeling when playing it...Now i know why, it reminds me of godus. Its's dull , bland ,generic, no challenge and uninspiring.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
if his diagnosis progress is over 85-90% full and if he's queuing to GP I send him straight to medication.

This probably helps - it's a lot of annoying busywork to look at it every few minutes and click click click though.

People also have oddities about waiting at benches etc - seems like there's some weird algorithm for when they decide they'll wait at a nice bench and when they'll just stand 5 feet away next to the door.

I've been trying it a bit, and I have forgotten a lot of Theme Hospital, but it's a pretty fun game. Nothing special, but worth a whirl.
 

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