Tycoon
Hospital
Playing and learning at the same time has never been so much fun, not
until tycoon came along. Tycoon hospital is a game designed for PC;
it was released on June 5, 2007 in North America, on June 8, 2007 in
Europe and on August 12, 2007 in Australia. The game lets the player
manage a hospital from a god view. Each different hospital is staffed
by medical teams and is packed with ill patients. The player needs to
manage the staff, ensure patients are cared for and have the correct
treatment facilities. As time progresses, new equipment will need to be
built in order to cope with incoming patients. The game can also be
played in a sandbox mode
Oddly enough, the biggest difference between Theme Hospital and
Hospital Tycoon is that the latter has a more developed theme. Whereas
the decade-old Bullfrog game was a straight god game, the story mode of
play here drops you into a soap opera with all the angst and twice the
cheese of a TV show like ER
or the late, great
St. Elsewhere. In addition to the usual tycoon-game management
chores, you get to follow the escapades of heartthrob doc Rick Steele
and the rest of the staff at Sapphire Beach Hospital. Everything here
is certainly more fantasy than reality. The glass-walled hospital looks
more like the famous Sydney Opera than the usual pile of bricks that
passes for houses of healing in most metropolitan centers these days.
DR Studios attempts to further this soapy feel with Sims-like
characters that speak in garbled simlish, have personality traits, and
hook up or hate one another by turns. As with The Sims, you can
take control of these jobs and force them to commit malicious acts on
one another like shove and intimidate, or social acts like shake hands
and tease, but there is rarely any point to doing so. Everybody mostly
gets along, so you're best off to let the staff run on autopilot and
interact however they see fit. This leads to some odd spectacles, if
you bother to watch. Why is popular Doc Buffman making out with the
hated Nurse Dakota? Why are Professor Brahms and Nurse Daisy having a
teasing tickle fight in the research room? You'll never know. Or care,
because these actions have little impact on your objectives, which
stick to the tried-and-true like curing diseases, building specific
equipment, and beautifying hospital corridors with fountains, statues,
and the like.
While Hospital Tycoon isn't doing anything especially new, it seems to
have great charm and looks like it will be a lot of fun to play. The
idea of using a soap-style storyline is likely to be a love-or-hate
thing for players, but it suits the subject matter and hasn't really
been tried in a game before. The only platform it's currently due for
release on is the PC. It will be unleashed on the world this June.
