by Kim Park

Created on: December 10, 2008   Last Updated: December 14, 2008

Hospital Hustle

A hospital time management game that fails to be a good time management game or a good hospital themed game.

My favourite thing about hospital themed games is that they can be completely ridiculous and get away with it. They can give their patients crazy illnesses that you, the user, then have to diagnosis and help treat. In Hospital Hustle you don't have any patients coming in with a bloated head or literal butterflies in their stomach, instead your patients have a different coloured faces... that's it! And, the colour of the faces doesn't even match up with the treatment. One patient with a red face will have to use a bed while another will have to get surgery.

I wasn't crazy about the game play either. There was a mixture of point and clicking and dragging. You would click to control where your character (the nurse) would go and you would drag the patients to the different areas of the hospital. The clicking can be annoying because I found that I was always missing the charts or pills on the prescription counter, instead my click would be directed to the back of the prescription counter. I also found the patients were sometimes every hard to pickup and drag, especially when you couldn't see them behind the X-ray machine.

Each level you have to cure a certain number of patients to get your hospital another star. You can also cure more patients to get an expert rating. I found the expert ratings got to be very frustrating because I would need to cure 16 people but only 16 people would come into my hospital. Now, I know that sounds reasonable but the patients never seem to come in and line up! For me, there was only ever one patient waiting to be diagnosed, which meant I was always waiting for another patient to get that expert rating.

The sound effects were extremely annoying. You would hear "Hey, watch it!", "Let me go!", etc. whenever you picked up a patient. It gets very repetitive very quickly and it's not possible to turn off the talking without turning off all sound effects. The music was typical hospital type music, nothing special, blending easily into the background.

I'm not sure this game had any creativity or innovation. Like I said before, they missed out on creating interested diseases. The only thing different from some time management games was that you controlled your character but also had to drag the patients around yourself. In most other games I've played you may drag the customer to the table but that's it, no dragging them all over the hospital.

Overall I give this game a 1.5/5 because I think there are some people that would enjoy playing it but I also think they would probably tire of it quickly, either because of the frustrating expectations or because of the repetitive sound effects.

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