Theme Hospital

There is no need for pretense here. This is a wonderful game, but it is just another simulation in a specific environment. You build a hospital/city/tower/theme park/safari/etc. Not that the genre is bad, just this game isn't that groundbreaking, IMO. It may certainly be the first application of this particular environment, but that doesn't make it fantastic, just different. By all means, it's worth playing once, but don't stay up in the night wondering what you've missed. It's another sim game, with it's own unique quirks. You would be better spending your time with a more recent sim that allows for greater flexibility in individual play styles. Final Word: Demo first, Buy later

This game is excellent, the gameplay is in-depth with lots of possibilities. I highly recommend it. You should also get CosixTH: https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH, because this makes Theme Hospital even better!

Excellent simulator that manages to scratch the same addictive itch as in RollerCoaster Tycoon; that sensation of building a hospital from a tiny set of rooms to a thriving, several-hundred-thousand dollar mega-hospital is something few sims are able to achieve. The game is just complex enough to be rewarding and to always give you something to do or think about, but rarely overwhelming. The experience, however, is marred by some serious problems that become especially frustrating in late game: - Bugs, bugs, bugs; most of the time the only way to solve them is to load an earlier save. At one point, a consultant-grade surgeon disappeared into a limbo outside of the boundaries of the map somehow and I couldn't pick him up. If you send someone to the autopsy room from the GP's Office, the door will suddenly disappear, rendering the room unusable. - Horrific pathfinding / AI. Remember how bad handymen were in RCT? Well, they've got nothing on these guys, who will happily walk through entire fields of vomit & trash. Late-game requires you to micromanage armies of handymen and surgeons, who have a strange habit of going walkabout when emergency queues are forming at the Operating Rooms. - The epidemic mechanic makes no sense and seems totally random - sometimes, you'll instantly run out of time to inoculate people even when no one has gone home; sometimes, you'll have a massive epidemic and the health inspector won't even notice it; sometimes, your health inspector will detect an infected patient clear on the other side of the map. Sometimes, it makes you want to hurl your computer out of a window. In summary, you'll more than get your money's worth from this by the time you start to get annoyed. I'd recommend playing RollerCoaster Tycoon first before tackling this. I should also note there's an open-source implementation called CorsixTH that might fix some of the bugs, but I never got a chance to try it out.

I love this game, It was a part of my childhood, but playing it now is just so annoying. Multiple times now I had to restart a level, after putting more than an hour into it, because of a bug. Doctors getting stuck in equipment, getting stuck in doors, falling through the floor, just plain disappearing and more. I don't remember this being such a problem back in the day, but it was a long time ago.

Very humourful and entertaining. But, right around the middle of the campaign, you start experiencing earthquakes which can destroy your equipment and render rooms unusable, unrepairable and unrecoverable. Very annoying.