Project Hospital

The game is fun in many aspects. If you like management games, there's a lot to get out of here, the problem is if the game lets you get that enjoyment in the first place. Multiple times I've encountered game breaking bugs that interfered with the campaign goals or in finishing an in-game event. Once a janitor's trolley got stuck in a ward, blocking the bed and rendering it unusable. I couldn't delete the bed nor the trolley. The only options was to transfer the patient to another hospital to get it unstuck, but that meant I failed the event. Another prominent bug was when patients would get skipped over for surgeries because they were 'waiting too long'. Can you imagine a doctor telling you that you can't get the surgery because you've been on the waitlist for too long? Rescheduling the patient for surgery doesn't change the logic and the patient is basically stuck there until they die or you transfer them away.

This game is really promising and has the potential to be fantastic, but its current design feels like it's missing the spirit that a spiritual successor to theme hospital should have. There are some basic glitches (a spammed notification meant I had to reload a save to remove it), but it's in a good direction. Maybe in a month or two all the major issues will be gone, so I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes!

I've played the Sims, and on a quick look-through, this game seemed to be similar enough that I might like it. The first tutorial taught the basics of running a small clinic to see patients. The second tutorial taught me how to build and furnish rooms. So far so good. But tutorial three was a jumbled mess, catapulting me suddenly from a small building with a few rooms to a multi-story hospital with multiple specialized doctors and rooms, and little or no explanation of HOW to actually do the things I was supposed to be learning. I never could figure out how to hire a Surgeon and satisfy the game that I had hired one, despite hiring three of them. Worse still, tutorial screens blocked out much of my view of the hospital rooms, and there was no way to drag these screens out of the way, or move my view of the hospital. The first two tutorials felt like the Sims, but the third tutorial had more people to manage than an entire Sims town, all in the same building, without any additional explanation. I could not pull up stats on a doctor by selecting their picture from the roster; I could only pull up their information by physically locating their body in the mass of people in the hospital and clicking on them directly. I couldn't even figure out how to change view between floors, and the tutorial didn't offer me that information either. This game was a waste of money, and it's unplayable.

More often than not these type of games are very comedy-based. This is a first for me where it takes a more serious tone, without leaving out the details of a hospital management... I love it!

This is just my initial impression and may change as I play more. Project Hospital tries to simulate a real hospital and as such is a lot more dreary than the comical approaches in Theme Hospital and Two Point Hospital. Unfortunately the game feels very unfinished, like the early stage of an early access game moreso than a finished release. It does however run decently and has consistent visuals, even though it feels slow because it runs in real time. Right from the get go you're presented with a messy UI that's designed in such a way that you have to drag the mouse all over the screen because all the panels and information you need is spread all over the place and don't open anywhere near where you click. On a large monitor and/or at high resolution this quickly becomes annoying. Construction is very clunky, requires a lot of clicks, and doesn't have shortcut keys like we're used to from other building games. The way to build rooms is unintuitive and illogical at best, and changing the size of a room requires starting the process over from scratch, and yet there does not appear to be any way to shrink a room or delete it once it's placed. Many items that are required to be placed together are seperate placeables, which means more clicking for no reason. They could just as easily have been one object.