Official Review PlayStation 5 Updated

War Hospital (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review

Name: War Hospital
Item: War Hospital
Rating: 6.3
Author: KiiWii

Product Information:

Release Date (NA): January 11, 2024
Release Date (EU): January 11, 2024
Publisher: Nacon DA
Developer: Brave Lamb
Genres: Simulation
Also For: Computer, Xbox Series X|S

Game Features:

Single player

Local Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Co-operative

The Great War wasn’t so great for those who lived through it.

It's June 1918 and you, Major Henry Wells, a former British combat medic, have been recruited to take charge of a field hospital during a crunch point of World War I, the war to end wars.

The game's premise is to take a run-down field facility and bring it back up to scratch to deal with the impending casualties and strengthen the western front. The more you can save, the more you have to fight, and the better the chances of winning the war.

As management simulations go this one aims to not only stretch your every nerve but also educate you as to just how gritty and overwhelming the situation was during the Great War. The game is sensitive to the subject matter and explains that though every life was valuable, extremely difficult decisions had to be made swiftly so that the resistance could continue and the war could be won.

Entering the game you have a preconceived notion of just how rough it would be for the medics and staff, and the developers, Brave Lamb, have done a sterling job of reinforcing the feelings, the struggles and the overarching enormity of responsibilities held here.

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There are no Right or Wrong Decisions, Supposedly

You begin with a vast number of tutorial pop-ups that are designed to ease you into every element going forward, and to begin with they are incredibly useful and you have enough time to utilise this knowledge and impart it across your base of operations.

Explosive injuries, bullets, chemicals and mental trauma all have to be dealt with with a focus on maintaining morale along the way by eeking out an existence, deploying every resource correctly, and building on them promptly. You must roll up your sleeves and get everyone involved by giving them a relevant part to play in what is essentially an RTS game of ultimate survival.

Starting with admissions in the casualty clearing station, you have to assign doctors to patients, evaluate their various states of health and posit the question: is it viable to save this person's life, even if they are a preferential VIP, without risking others and potentially the safety of this facility?

Moving on to the Operations Ward, decisions arise from complications, time crunch and lack of supplies. It's in your hands to take the advice of the chief medical officers or go against their better judgment and make a choice to do something unorthodox or more beneficial to the community wasting less time and resources in the process.

If you are running out of supplies you can ship them in via train which takes careful scheduling and planning, or you can also build warehouses and pharmacies to stockpile and develop the necessary items you require. Building mandates engineers, so again you can ship in specialist people to delegate these precious tasks to, but as ever: it requires you to watch the clock and get things done on time.

Placing the on-the-mend soldiers into rehab offloads hospital bed numbers and queues them up ready for re-enlisting, discharge, or sending to HQ. This process encourages you to either bolster the front line or discharge men to earn papers that you can use to obtain more equipment and improved resources.

My first thought was to strengthen the war effort and pump soldiers back into action and I also focussed on scouts and dogs after a battalion is deployed to you after the first few days. This strategy however, meant that I had bundles of resources but no draft papers or staff permits with which to improve my initial triage and with the tutorial beats still persistently asking me to buy an X-Ray machine: the nagging, for what felt like an unnaturally long time, eventually forced me to quit and retry, hopefully learning from my previous mistakes.

Staff also have to be accounted for along the way with a canteen and lodgings requiring upgrades, and constant maintenance throughout to ensure the people working behind the scenes also have a decent quality of life and reasonable morale to keep them powering through. The "skill tree" for this is quite fleshed out here with multiple paths to improving healing, housing, production and scouts, and there are quite a few ways you can implement these that give the game a little replayability in terms of trying something different if it doesn't work out first time around.

The inevitability of death means that a cemetery is part and parcel of the layout, and giving the dead an honourable burial is important too, so having people there to deal with that aspect is beneficial and speeds up the process of making way to treat more casualties, but its also a capital-sink when it comes to designating people to obtain, craft and finish headstones too.

Each element of the game feels as if you are spinning plates but as the game progresses you get dates to survive until whereby you are granted reinforcements, more vital supplies and more staff to help the effort. These moments solidify your efforts and give you a little IRL morale boost to keep going.

The time crunch is constant and the stacking effect of increasing numbers of wounded, decreasing medicines and money often called for me to have to restart because I had ploughed resources into rations and alcohol production, rather than saving a little back for something handy, like technology, to assist in making life or death calls with more efficiency and therefore higher success rate and increased community morale.

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Rewarding in spots, Dismal in others

One thing I would say is that the game is quite rewarding when you're forging forward, bolstering morale, winning the war on death and making positive decisions, but there is a bit of a disconnect when it comes to building relationships with the characters involved. There is little to no engagement or character progression, everyone is just a cog in the machine doing their part but there is no personality to it. Sure you meet some characters with quirky accents along the way but those exchanges feel like small story beats for that moment and not true interactions that further your bond with them.

After a while, you will notice that the cycle is complete and you are merely rinsing and repeating the same actions over and over, adding in one more thing, and attempting to maintain the stability of your hospital: much like typical "Tycoon" games. Luckily you can gain quicker traction in your success by speeding the game up to 4X in-game speed and pushing forward until you need to slow it back down or pause it to make a critical decision again.

Playing the game is effectively point-and-click with a simplified hover-menu over each POI in your command. These hover-menus display the current condition of the facility at hand, the number of people within, and indicates whether it needs more staff or trimming down based on raw performance. With a simple button press to zoom inside and enter the area with Cross, make quick improvements with Square, or check up on the people/patients/staff with Triangle, you can engage with that location quickly and easily.

The use of quick menus facilitates easier, quicker association of thoughts for the player too, and if you need to quickly go to the train station, draft in some more engineers or medics then this becomes simpler with quick actions on the L1 and R1 buttons.

The main menu features are well laid out, and quite easy to grasp, though the sheer number of them became overwhelming quite early on, and I had to re-enable tutorial reminders so that I could grasp what is where and what needs attention foremost.

The game operates like a familiar "Tycoon" style game, but instead of money and power, you strive for survivors and humanity.

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A Great Premise, Underwhelmingly Executed

War Hospital is a tough game to review in that it tugs with your empathy but never delivered me a truly all-encompassing and engaging experience. I felt like I was the Flex Tape holding together a system that was only ever going to just about scrape through and succeed. I never felt powerful enough, nor could I excel, rather, I constantly experienced impending doom and second-guessed every decision I made; and I made a lot of wrong decisions throughout my time playing this game.

Perhaps I'm just not well-versed enough in resource management games to evaluate this one, but it feels to me like a missed opportunity for something better and more visceral that never quite evolved that much-needed trait through the concept stages.

Graphically it runs silky smooth with a simplistic stylised aesthetic across the buildings and people depicted. The cut scene illustrations are a little bland but the sound effects and voices are well implemented to build on the gloomy atmosphere of the wet, muddy, run-down war life.

Those who want to endure the historically charged but morbidly fuelled simulation of a war hospital set in the First World War may find more enjoyment in this title, though its gritty, dreary, sombre atmosphere is always at the fore so I felt it quickly becomes a labour of painstaking necessity over being a fun or attractive title.

Verdict

What We Liked ...

Incredibly sensitive to the subject matter
Lots of plates to spin as pressure builds up
Three chapters to forge through with a fourth coming soon
29 trophies to obtain

What We Didn't Like ...

Stat management is not super engaging
Relatively boring cycle of events
Re-starting the game can become tedious

Gameplay

Management sim enjoyers and even historians will get a kick out of this for a while, but anyone wanting a more joyful experience should look elsewhere as it's quite sombre and sobering throughout.

Presentation

The endless pop-ups are relevant but quickly become overly intrusive, especially for beginners like me. Graphically it runs well, depicts a stylised but gritty reality of the First World War and manages to demonstrate a sensitivity to the subject matter.

Lasting Appeal

Repetitive gameplay kept losing my attention, and the lack of depth with characters gave me little reason to want to re-play any of it. With over 30 hours of gameplay (sped up) it's a constant grind throughout, but you could do it all again with the power of hindsight if you REALLY wanted to, to see if you can do it more efficiently or more cleverly.

6.3

out of 10

Overall

War Hospital is not for everyone, but it does offer an intriguing insight into 1918's war support operations. The game's bleak and unforgiving nature is compounded by a huge plethora of systems and databases that become monotonous and cyclic.

Reactions: Prans

K3Nv2
Jan 21, 2024

Sounds like review points for a average hospital visit.

"Relatively boring cycle of events"

F fx0rec
Jan 21, 2024

Lead Designer after reading the news paper "How quickly can we get it up n running???"

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