Two Point Hospital: A Theme Hospital for the Modern Gamer!

https://www.twopointhospital.com/

This game was just released and it is receiving rave reviews from people! I've heard it captures all the spirit of Theme Hospital while bringing a lot of modern conveniences and just more in general to the game.

My coworker has been playing it and loves it too!

I remember being pleasantly surprised by Theme Hospital back in the day, in spite of resource management stuff not really being my kind of gameplay. If I have time I might pick this up at some point.

I'm curious to hear people's impressions of this one. I'm interested, but very much on the fence.

I watched a Let's Play for about 15 minutes. Maybe it was the way the person was playing and the things they were focusing on, but my initial impressions were that there was a lot of cookie-cutter repetition going on, pretty quickly. It didn't exactly make me feel like it would be a game I'd enjoy for more than a short time.

(For reference, I do remember having a chance to play Theme Hospital a long time ago, but not for an extended time. Gameplay did seem quite similar.)

I also wondered if it might be a game where you're trying to micro-manage a max-min layout for the hospital, in terms of how to use space well.

I liked the visuals, the gentle humor, and the way the gameplay flowed.

Well, the problem, especially with a tycoon game and one that I assume you were watching an LP of the beginning, is that they are typically very limited at first. So I imagine the game grows a lot in complexity as you go along, just like Theme Hospital did.

BoogtehWoog wrote:

Well, the problem, especially with a tycoon game and one that I assume you were watching an LP of the beginning, is that they are typically very limited at first. So I imagine the game grows a lot in complexity as you go along, just like Theme Hospital did.

Good point. I did watch the first 15 minutes of the guy's second video, so it was the start of a second hospital, right after he finished the first tutorial hospital. He was mainly building wards in the hospital, then bought a second building and started doing the same thing again.

I don't want to render judgement on the game based on that, but it didn't move me closer to wanting to pick it up.

I haven't played Theme Hospital since around release 97-98, so I don't remember too much other that just really liking it. Naturally nostalgia set in and I bought Two-point.

I've played the first two tutorial hospitals last night and I was engaged enough to miss my bed time by two hours. So far I think it's a nice, cheeky, low-stress game with a good helping of nostalgia.

If you want a sim, this probably isn't for you. I am looking forward to cracking open some beers and playing it this weekend.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I don't want to render judgement on the game based on that, but it didn't move me closer to wanting to pick it up.

You may also want to consider that it isn't a good LP as well. Sometimes they just don't "get" the game.

I played an hour last night and enjoyed it, you basically run different sized hospitals. You unlock bigger ones as you go along, but can go back to pick up where you left off with old ones. I'm not sure if the bigger game is managing multiple hospitals. The game makes it really simple to edit things about, I found at first I was making rooms to big, but found it easy to edit down a room. I'm interested to see how the difficulty spikes, as I only just unlocked the next hospital, but carried on with the first one, as it still seemed like there were things to do.

There is also Project Hospital, anyone tried the other one? That one seems less theme parky and more of a serious business management sim.

Loved Theme Hospital. Cant imagine I wont get this one at some point.

Tamren wrote:

There is also Project Hospital, anyone tried the other one? That one seems less theme parky and more of a serious business management sim.

Project Hospital isn't out yet, and doesn't have an early access build, at least not that you can get through steam.

Ah ok, it seem to be making it's way around the youtuber community. I didn't know it was still in alpha.

Played a few hours so far and enjoying my time. It’s quite a lot of fun trying to decide how to design everything and then you’ve got all the little things going on in the background to keeep things interesting. It makes me want an evil genius 2 game in this art style.

Not sure about art style, but there is an Evil Genius 2 in the works....

Yeah, I want that sooooooo bad!

Lost track of time a bit with this game last night, I’m onto the third hospital and it’s clicking nicely into place. I’m not finding anything too difficult right now though.

I became a bit annoyed with how my staff would just decide to wander off from their posts I set. A friend told me you have to manually prohibit what jobs they can do, and I sort of wish it was the other way around.

I got a free copy cos my suggestion of "Jest Infection" co-won that competition they ran (though I still think that clownydia is funnier)

I've three starred four hospitals now (I'm on the fracture ward level now). It's much more forgiving than Theme Hospital used to be, and I'm finding it nicely relaxing. I ended up with about 70 staff in the university level just because I was running big training courses.

I wish there was a reason to keep working on them after they've been three starred. A few more star levels would help I think - I've usually got a few more buildings I haven't extended to yet.

How is everyone laying out their ozzies? I tend to have diagnostics up front, and push treatment further away. In larger levels the sheer number of GP clinics tends to gobble up a lot of space in the initial building. The other diagnostics rooms probably form a production line (are patients sent to them in a particular order until diagnosis is complete? Probably optimisable). That suggests that the final layout of a reception and GP building, one other building completely for other diagnostics, and then all the treatment rooms further away. Staff rooms could probably be further away, though close by would mean less staff downtime. I'm not sure what to do with the bogs - a small number of palatial outfits (the reception & GP building will probably get a lot of traffic), or lots of tiny cubes? Is there any downside to making patients walk a bit?

I try to arrange mine similarly to a production line. Reception+GP+Diag first, then treatment, then everything else.

In the University level, I started with the basics, then rearranged the hospital 2-3x now as I expanded. GP (up to 7 now) and Diagnostics (2 of each) in the first building with a little spill, with treatment in the ancillary buildings (up to 4), with Research and Training furthest away. I don't have nearly that 70 staff, but that University level is pretty crazy with the need for GPs and training.

I love that you can pick up rooms and move them; however, I wish you could save room layouts to make them easier to plop down in a hurry.

Can you pick up rooms and move them? I don't know how to do that.

DudleySmith wrote:

Can you pick up rooms and move them? I don't know how to do that.

Click on a room, then when the panel at the right hand side turns up, click “edit”. Then if you put your cursor over anywhere on the floor of the room, it should change to a four point arrow axis. Then you can just pick up and move it wherever. Keep in mind, if your space is full and you nowhere to temporarily drop it, you can’t do anything but delete it.

The ease of being able to edit and add to rooms is probably one of my favourite things about the game.

The room and object placement reminded me a lot of Startopia, and sure enough, Two Point studios appears to have a bunch of Mucky Foot and Bullfrog devs and designers. I'm so in.

The fracture wards seem buggy to me. My wards are full of patients standing around receiving treatment, but not getting better, but getting more and more bored, hungry, thirsty and desperate for the bogs.

Googling has the problem has thrown up some other people with the same issue - it's something to do with the plaster machine.

The other thing I didn't realise is that after going to a diagnosis room, if a patient still hasn't been diagnosed they go back to the GPs office, which is why you can end up with big queues there.

Managed to three star the first two hospitals, hopefully get some play time in this weekend. Overall it reminds me so much of Theme Hospital, which is exactly what I wanted. Really worth the day one purchase.

Argh. I was having a hard time making any money with my latest hospital, and then I remembered the issue about the Fracture Ward. And then I found out that a there's a beta branch on Steam that has the fix as of yesterday:

Hotfix v1.03 - BETA BRANCH Ward Fix + more
Hiya Scrubs! Happy Friday

We’ve been hard at work improving the game and we’re ready to release a patch for a few issues that have cropped up. We’ll be adding it to a beta branch first before migrating it over to the default branch.

If you’d like to test out the new patch, you can download it by following these steps:

1. Right-click Two Point Hospital in your game library and select Properties.
2. Select the BETAS tab.
3. Choose twopointhospital_patch_beta from the drop-down menu.
4. The build will start downloading.

Here's what the patch will fix:

• Fix most cases of career save disappearing
• Fix people getting stuck in wards and fracture wards
• Fix many cases of patients getting stuck after loading old saves
• Fix zombie guest trainers that were broken in old saves
• Fix up part-created rooms that were broken in old saves
• Fix rage quitting patients staying in hospital
• Fix some cases of staff not starting training when dropped into training room
• Improve cases of challenge patients arriving too late
• Fix mouse issues on gaming mice
• Speed up saving game - much faster for career-only saves
• Fix visualisation modes getting stuck
• Fix spurious errors in log on shutting down
• Various minor art fixes

If I'm planning on picking this up at some time, is there any point getting and playing Theme Hospital now? In general I don't like playing very old looking games, but if things are easy enough to identify and the UI isn't bad, I am OK doing it if the game is very good.

I know Theme Hospital is on GoG, so you shouldn't have any problems running it on modern hardware.

I think it's aged well. The graphics still look great, esp. in light of so many modern indies aping the look of the era.

But is the gameplay close enough between Two Point Hospital and Theme Hospital where just playing Two Point Hospital later would be plenty? I don't think I'd need to play both if they are very similar.

Well in that case I'd suggests waiting until you can get Two Point.

Games are pretty gosh-darn similar.

Wish there was a way to set up shifts for your workers rather than just restricting jobs they can do. How is everyone approaching staff numbers? I found on the third hospital I ended up just wildly hiring people the minute there was any problem. The amount of profit I made each month made it easy to do so.

I'm well into the game and I am still employing the same strategy of just hiring more staff as needed.

Maybe the game gets harder later on and that is no longer a viable strategy but I've seen no evidence of that yet.

Pinkerton wrote:

I'm well into the game and I am still employing the same strategy of just hiring more staff as needed.

Maybe the game gets harder later on and that is no longer a viable strategy but I've seen no evidence of that yet.

That strategy stopped working for me trying to get the third star in Flemington. I'm not entirely sure exactly how it happened, but I ended up in a position where my wage costs massively outstripped my income. I'm guessing there are bottlenecks that capped out my income, but I went from profitable to unprofitable somewhere along the line. I'd pretty much stopped hiring more staff, but perhaps promotions killed me by not really increasing throughput but hiking up outgoings.

Checking the financial graphs regularly is going to have to be part of my process I guess - the way that wages go out at the end of the month means it's easy to lose track if you're not careful.