Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward Review

Written by: Steve Martin Posted: 4th August 2009

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Steve gets sick when he visits this hospital.

Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward Details:

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	Casual
	PC/Nintendo Wii/Nintendo DS
	GameInvest
	Oxygen

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Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward is quintessentially low-budget gaming, it feels cheap and nasty and is more like one of those little Flash games you get on your phone or play online!

You take control of a nurse and you have to help out a struggling hospital for 9 days, each day lasts about 10 minutes, and you have to cure a certain number of patients inside the time limit to progress to the next day. It works like this, a patient comes in and sits down, you have to pick them up with the Wii pointer and drop them off at the doctor’s room to get them diagnosed. Once diagnosis is complete, a thought bubble above their head shows the treatment required and so you pick them up and drag them to wherever they need to be next. If you can’t cure their ailment a red cross is displayed, and all you can do is shove them in an ambulance outside to go to another hospital. You then need to direct your nurse to the pharmacy counter to pick up the patients prescription, by clicking on the chart on the counter and take it to the patient by clicking on them. Your character will then trundle off and complete the tasks you have appointed them to do. Occasionally they will also need medicine which is done in exactly the same way and you may need to tidy up some beds, which is done by clicking on the bed and then the laundry basket. You can queue tasks by clicking on the relevant objects and they will be done in turn.

If a patient is ignored for too long they will leave, but cure a patient and you will receive funds, which can be used to buy new equipment so you can cure more people, or put into salaries to speed up the staff or into maintenance so your equipment does not break as often but this resource management is so simplistic it’s not worth paying any attention to it!

There is very little variety in the gameplay and it soon gets very dull, if you’ve ever played Dinner Dash then this is exactly the same! It boils down to pointing, clicking and some dragging, and it never gets any better! It starts off ridiculously easy and the tutorial talks you through every step to begin with and points out exactly what you need on each stage. Once you have completed your 9 days at the first hospital, you move onto a busier or larger hospital. Once you get onto the levels where you have two floors the game begins to get very tricky and becomes no fun at all, as you can’t see what’s going on above or below you so you have to constantly move between floors to check on your patients and make sure they are being cared for. To compensate for this they start giving you a coffee that you can drink at the pharmacy counter which speeds up your nurse’s movement but its still irritating swapping between floors all the time.

Changing hospitals also changes your clientele, with mum’s bringing their children to be checked or more old people to deal with. Other than that there’s very little to talk about, you can’t even customise your hospital as stuff can only go in certain places designated on screen. The humour in this game is terribly unfunny and childish and the one-liners that the tannoy announcer comes out with are pitiful and irritating!

The games visuals are simplistic and basic if you’re feeling generous. If not then they are terrible! They are functional mostly, except for the sometimes indistinguishable thought bubbles above the patient’s head, which can cause some confusion at times as well as the number on the prescription charts!

The music is repetitive and uninspiring, a proper dull tune for a dull game! The tannoy bloke needs to be shot as he’s less funny than Alan Carr and twice as annoying too!

It sounds like I’m being harsh, and I am being a little, as there is nothing wrong with the game but this is a budget title through and through that provides little in entertainment and no long term value. This could quite easily be a Flash game on the internet, but to try and palm it off as a console game and charge money for it makes me feel a little sick. If you’re thinking of buying this, I would like to direct you to this quote from the NHS which is what you should do when you get it: Catch it, bin it, kill it!