War Hospital Review (Aramis)
I really want to like this game because it does 2 things that I like. It covers a time period which I find interesting and it covers it from a perspective that I find interesting. I like both medicine and history so I was really interested when I saw this game especially since they seemed to take history very seriously. And at first I really liked the game but there are serious problems.
First the game has a bunch of bugs that should have been fixed by now. It really seems like the developers abandoned the game way to early.
Secondly the gameplay is not very good and the micromanagement really kills the game because in order to get an overview of what is going on in your hospital you have to flip through several menus. There is no easy way of just surveying the hospital and getting a sense for what is happening or what is going wrong right now. The menus are not very good and I constantly have my scouts sitting at base doing nothing because sometimes they will continue the mission without orders and sometimes they need to be ordered to continue the next step of their scouting mission. This is just terrible game design. And it gets worse because the resource management is really frustrating in this game. You have separate resource pools for hiring staff and for buying resources or upgrades. The thing is you can't get the resource that gives you more manpower you can only receive it through special events.
Thirdly the historical accuracy has been traded in for DEI. They say in their art book that they changed a British officer to an Indian one because "...it provided more interesting opportunities for interactions." as far as I can tell there is no interesting interactions and it seems to simply be a reskin of an English officer. The historical problem start when you realise that it is highly unlikely that an Indian officer would command a British engineering company but even worse when you realise that during the time period that the game takes place there were no Indians fighting in France except for 2 cavalry brigades. Those brigades were being withdrawn at the time the game takes place which makes it funny that something like half of the casualties you recieve are Indian... And for some reason I keep getting a bunch of Chinese soldiers at my field hospital in France... It so obviously doesn't fit with the historical aspect that it takes you out of the game everytime you see it and you see it a lot.
Fourthly the medical aspect is super shallow. Basically non existant. And I get it that you can't expect all gamers to have a medical license but that's a teaching opportunity and you don't really make any medical decisions in the game so it's a moot point. But it kinda ruins the fun and the main selling point of the game when you get a casualty you see a card that is extremely abstract. You don't get any vitals, there are no injuries, very little relevant information, etc. All you get is a card with 1-3 bloody bullet holes in to represent the severity of the injury. Then you have his current condition represented as Good - Stable - critical - terminal. Then there is a bunch of stats that represent how long time the operation will take, how big of a chance that it will be more or less complicated and a stat for how exhausting the operation is for the surgeon and finally a stat that tells you how likely the patient is to die during the operation.
I mean compare this to project hospital which is way more advanced and way more fun but basically the same game in a modern civilian setting. You get a patient card and it tells you the symptoms and gives you the ability to perform different diagnostic evaluations and relevant treatments. And you can take direct control of your doctors or you can let them do their own thing while you manage and build your hospital. Or if you want to go even deeper into the sim/edutainment aspect you could have made a game like Life or Death which is a very simplified version of how diagnostics and treatments work in real life but it is still fun and educational.
I do like the art style but it kinda feels like they drew a bunch of nice concept art and then they forgot they had to make a game too.