Two Point Hospital Review

Two Point Hospital isn’t just a great successor to Theme Hospital, it’s a fine example of a management sim done well. It’s one of the most refined titles in recent memory for the genre, and while at times it feels chaotic and overwhelming, there’s barely a bitter pill to swallow throughout your career in hospital management. 

It may be technically a spiritual successor, but Two Point feels like a direct sequel to Bullfrog Productions late 90s classic, even down to the goofy graphics and ridiculous illnesses that plague your hospital grounds. In total, Two Point offers 21 hospitals (including the sites included in the two DLC packs that come with the console version) to manage, each with their own unique missions and tasks. While building and managing each hospital calls upon a similar skill set, throughout the campaign each location has a unique set of challenges, from managing your hospital with inexperienced junior doctors, to curing a certain amount of people with a particular disease. 

The game never stagnates, always providing new and interesting challenges to make each hospital feel unique and worthwhile. A majority of missions grant your hospital a one star rating, unlocking further hospitals for you to play, but completionists can keep going, increasing each hospitals rating up to a total of three stars.

But while challenges change, the meat and potatoes remains the same throughout, filling your hospital grounds with the required buildings and hiring doctors and nurses to help keep your patients in tip-top condition. Daily management is a balancing act, but there’s a surprising amount of depth to the system. Hiring cleaners that have the skills to deal with dodgy machinery and ghostly apparitions is a must, almost as important as hiring a doctor who can conduct research when needed. Each hospital is a balancing act, a war between keeping everyone happy and preparing for whatever challenge is around the corner. 

New locations unlock new illnesses to cure, increasing the pressure on you to constantly adapt your hospitals to the challenge. Part of the appeal of Two Point however is discovering each new illness, especially those with visual effects such as Jest Infection, a disease that turns patients into clowns and Pandemic, which causes patients to inherit a permanent pan on their heads. 

But the off-beat humour isn’t a distraction for quality, in fact Two Point Hospital is surprisingly deep for a console management sim. Employees can be trained, research can be completed and money can be managed with a degree of satisfaction that you don’t usually expect from titles of this ilk. It’s really satisfying that a game where people can be infected with a disease that turns them into Bigfoot, also allows you to review and manage your employees wages in a fantastic amount of detail.

And even when you think you’ve got a handle on things, Two Point Hospital loves to throw curveballs your way. Outbreaks of diseases flood your wards with new patients, often with new diseases and ailments you’ve yet to come across. Health inspectors make your life a nightmare, tarnishing your reputation by giving you a particularly nasty report. Staff aren’t much better, giving you nothing but grief, complaining about pay, conditions and, well, pretty much anything they can to make your life harder. Doing well in times of trouble allows you to unlock new items and customisation options for your hospital, giving you a constant flow of rewards for your hard work. 

Squashing a game like Two Point Hospital onto a console is risky business, but as far as ports go the game doesn’t feel condensed. In fact, unless you’ve previously played the game on a PC or Mac then you’ll be hard pushed to find fault with the controls. Previous players may take a little time to adjust, especially as once-sprawling menus have been squidged into comparatively smaller tiles, but it’s a small price to pay for what’s otherwise a fantastic console edition of a deep management sim. It also looks just as good on console as it does on PC, with beautiful bright colours and animations displaying the absolute chaos on-screen. 

Two Point Hospital is a wonderful game, no matter which way you play it. It’s a fun, gorgeous hospital sim, complete with ludicrous illnesses and maddening tasks. More than anything else, Two Point is a fantastic callback to one of the best games of the 90s, and it certainly does its roots proud.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.