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Monday, January 22, 2024 3:28:22 AM

War Hospital Review (Maroon Deck Wins)

I just finished this game, and I enjoyed it. It's significantly flawed, however. I would only recommend it if you're someone like me who would like something to tide them over until Frostpunk 2 and is willing to overlook some major issues.
The first obvious issue is bugs. I junked my first playthrough due to one that made my food demands double for no reason. The chapter system does help, because the transitions between chapters clears a lot of the bugs that pile up. I finished Chapter 2 with 7 dead spaces in my rehab center (patients who did not show up anywhere but took up a slot), but thankfully moving to Chapter 3 cleared them.
Another is a general lack of polish. The patient biographies are a nice idea, but the mix of randomly distributed attributes makes little sense, to the point of immersion breaking. For example, most soldiers with children are not married, but divorced, widowed, or separated from their spouses. This just isn't at all realistic for the time period. Similarly, the distribution of soldier names makes no sense. Yes, the British empire used soldiers from all over, but most soldiers were drawn from the UK proper and would have names that reflect that.
I also find fault with some aspects of the gameplay. The system for getting wounded soldiers from the trenches defending the hospital functions poorly. Even if you max out everything related to it, you end up with a poorly-functioning system, and most critically your medic teams will not start sending soldiers from the Advanced Dressing Station to the hospital proper until all wounded in the trenches are recovered. Sometimes you might need each team to recover as many as nine wounded to get everyone, and by that point many of the casualties are about to die. It especially makes no sense once you've unlocked ambulances. It takes only a few seconds for a medic team to load the ambulances, which then operate independently.
This annoyance aside, I'd say the game is actually fairly easy. Most reviews seem to think the game is too hard. If you've played a lot of Frostpunk (as I have), it isn't, at all. The key is to build improvements that lower operation difficulty, which isn't too hard to do. This means you lose fewer patients, which keeps morale up and gives you more resources. It also lets you effectively treat patients who are in worse shape. You should also uses nurses almost exclusively at the hospital, reserving the bare minimum to keep the rehab center going and ignoring the triage station entirely.
If you do this, almost every patient survives and you get a lot of simplifications, which speeds things up, saves a lot of materials, and boosts morale more.
There are two other areas that would benefit from additional development. One is the last act, which was not even half-baked and just became a repetitive slog, combined with a race to build unneeded improvements to complete achievements. The other is the scout map. It just isn't very important, and I think I unlocked three depots total the entire game, none in the third act.
All in all, this a decent game for a small developer. It's maybe a little overpriced, and it pretty clearly wasn't made by people who speak English as a first language. I will probably buy the DLC when I feel like playing it again because it's quite cheap. I don't see much reason to play the main game again besides chasing achievements.