Review – War Hospital

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From the opening cut scene of War Hospital it becomes quite clear that it isnt an ordinary management game. Developer Brave Lamb studios debut game has genuine weight to both the story told and the decisions needing to be made. Every soldier comes with a tough decision. Are they truly worth the resources to save? Can they even be saved or are they too injured to even try. Once you do decide if they are worthy of saving what do you do with them, send them back to the frontline, back to HQ for re-assignment or outright discharge them? Decisions decisions.

While the storytelling in the game is kept to a minimum it does its job in keeping things moving and giving the game purpose. Set in the late stages of World War 1 you are tasked with running a War Hospital behind the frontline. As the Germans close in on you things become more and more dire, the attacks become more frequent and the decisions get more difficult. The game also tells side stories through Scouts. Your scouts talk to locals, trail enemy units and you can decide what to do from there. While it isn’t the main loop of the game I thought it was a nice enough touch to add just a hint of story in a genre that isn’t always the best at telling one.

Since this is a management game, as expected the entire focus is on doing exactly that. You have 3 main things to manage, your patients, your staff and your resources. Each come with interesting decisions that can deeply affect your mission in a positive or negative way. Try to be a hero and save as many soldiers as you can and you are likely to have many die during operation causing a major morale decay amongst your staff which makes them less effective. Don’t save enough soldiers and you wont have enough to send back to the frontline and will ultimately fail. It strikes a very solid balance between manageable and unforgiving. If you run out of resources, both medicine and food, you will again be unable to save as many as you’d like and suffer a morale hit. The entire premise of the gameplay loop is keep your staff happy and rested and your patients healed. Either one goes array and you’re in trouble.

When it comes to resources you have 2 options. Hire engineers to make supplies for you, or order some from HQ that arrive via train in intervals. Both have their positives and negatives. Ordering from HQ requires other resources (I’ll call it money for simplicity sake). But those same resources are also required to upgrade your hospital and produce medicine and food. Spend too much of it buying your supplies and your hospital wont be upgraded enough to keep up. Dont spend enough and you will likely not be able to keep up. Again its a balance that they do well here.

What you will ultimately be doing for the vast majority of your gameplay is deciding what patients get sent for surgery and what patients get sent to die and managing your staffs fatigue levels. At some point you can upgrade enough to get shifts to manage your rest but i honestly found that to be a hindrance more than a help. Any time I used shifts my hospital typically fell to bits quite quickly, so I found managing it myself a longer, but ultimately easier task. The doctors can be assigned rest after so many surgeries and will rest if they don’t have anything to do, the nurses,engineers and medic teams must be sent back and forth between housing and their jobs to rest up.

The main negative of the gameplay however is a lack of variety. Within the first 20 minutes of the game you will likely have seen all there is to offer. As you progress further into the game they will introduce 2 additional types of doctors, but all that really does is have you sending patients to 3 different sets of doctors instead of one. While I personally had no issues with the lack of variety, if you are hoping for many new mechanics being added in to keep things fresh as you go along, you will likely be disappointed.

And finally, we have to talk a little bit about the technical side of the game. For a game that is essentially one tiny little section of a map and a few menus, it had its share of issues. My game would freeze on occasion and crashed a handful of times, which can be a disaster if you hadn’t saved in awhile and lose an hour or more of progress. I had heard others having this issue so I made sure to save a lot, and I highly recommend you do as well to save yourself any headaches incase it does crash. Beyond that the game looks fine, it’s a management game so you shouldn’t expect mind blowing graphics. When it was working right it looked fine.

If you are a fan of the management genre, I think there is a lot here for you to like. Its not without its issues but after my 25 hours of game time to get through the 3 chapters after a few fails I came away happy that I had played it. Playing a game in this genre that has weight to each decision was a nice change of pace, even if it is a matter of life and death. I also think it is a great concept and shows you a very different side of the war efforts which not many think about.