izigame.me

I was really looking forward when War Hopistal was announced. The premise looked promising and there are not many games out there depicting horrors of war in the genre of base/resource/staff management. We could talk about This War of Mine and Frostpunk from which War Hospital takes many features and similarity is resembling, especially for the latter.
The game is spread around 3 chapters and while the initial steps around your hospital seems interesting, after a while it becomes click/drag fest without any need to think. This is especially obvious in the last 3rd chapter. Not sure if I "broke" the game and found ideal setup, but I have breeze through the 3rd chapter on highest speed just assigning patients and clicking on simplifications/complications.
War Hospital feels simply very rushed, where one would think that the authors were able to deliver somewhat nice game in first 2 chapters, but ran out of ideas for the third. I found myself often times wondering why they decided to do this and that. Some examples:
- The Operating Ward does not have button for Assignments. Understandable for Doctors, but there are Nurses as well.
- Scouting missions are nice, but often times the POI pops up out of nowhere without any notification so sometimes I was not able to finish few in time as I checked the map late. When you complete chapter everything resets, so you just missed out on some if you are not checking regurarly.
- Do not understand Trucks and Depots, throughout entire game I ran into one depot in chapter 2. Not sure if I locked out of some due to Scouting mission decision or what, but I do no think this is a good design. There could be at least indication what are the rewards for completing the mission. (There are noted resources for some missions)
- Missing option to drag multiple soldiers in Rehabilition Center to one slot. In chapter 3 I was dragging more than in Paint. It was crazy
- No notification about VIPs in chapter 3 and no automatic assignment to correct slot in Rehab? guess a bug
- The notifier sound about incoming patiens sometimes bugged out and was not working at all, only reload helped
- Many features are not explained very well. For example, if I would assign more soldiers to the trenches, would it lead to less casualties?
- While I think the graphics is fine for this type of game, the cutscenes of german attacks are simply joke and looks like someone filmed Toy Soldiers. I just skipped from third onwards. There could be more interesting variety added to this
- No replay value at all. While I played Frostpunk scenarios many times to try to beat my last run, choose different options in Scouting missions, etc., here I do not feel I would ever come back. There is absolutely no reason to.
- Not sure if the Medics assigned to ADS is just visual glitch, but they often chose completely different road where the wounded patients were
- I do not understand why during the shift change, the workers leave their ubications right when their shift start. Their work starts at 08:00 but they come to the building at 08:30, leaving every single building unattended for 30 minutes. I always joked on this in my head like Nurses decide "Oh well, goodbye patients, my colleague will come in 30 minutes. I do hope you won't die here in CCS till she comes". Every building stops functioning for these 30 minutes twice a day for 12-h Shifts. My boss would fire me from work if I would apply this logic in real life. I stopped tracking this in 3rd chapter even when I had 8 hour shifts set for some building.
- Storywise the 3rd chapter is complete lackluster. I was at least expecting some major attack or something at the end similar to Frostpunk final storm. But my hospital was like the best establishment around the place, where everyone was welcome and nobody would need to fear dying. The improvements were done in first 3rd of the final chapter, scouting missions same. There was absolutely no reason to play only to just see the end.
- (EDIT) Adding one point for 3rd Chapter. The Main Mission is to survive. Great. Aside from this, the only "side quests" that popped up were to send soldiers to HQ. Repeatedly. Always. I was able to finish like 5 or 6 of these as I was healing everyone and sending over to HQ anyways to get resources. That is 24 soldiers per mission. You can do the math in regards of the drag fest. This was balanced a bit with scouting missions, which were by the way nice, but as I mentioned previously, these were done really fast and till the end there was nothing really to do aside of waiting it out.
That is currently all I can think of while I am still processing the bitter end of the promising game that could be much better thing. Feels bit like Early Access and while I got 53 hours clocked, in reality it was much less as I am caregiving for baby and often I just let the game run in background. Maybe I would say 40 hours. In case this will be on sale, maybe get it just to try it out, but overall I would not recommend buying.