War Hospital Review (RobOda)
No - too shallow overall.
I want to like the game, because it is one of those that tries to showcase the horrors of WWI and the difficulties of managing a war hospital, but it falls flat on two counts;
1. Once you understand how to triage things, the gameplay loop becomes boring.
The devs did say they wanted to provoke the player's emotions via patient profiles (they're married, have kids, whatever) but the reality is when you're dealing with 5+ patients, and eventually 10+, you're not really going to pay attention to that sort of thing because it is completely irrelevant.
The only statistics that matter are; 1. How difficult the operation will be, and 2. how many resources will we spend fixing this person up.
If a patient arrives terminal? Send him to the palliative care department, he'll die on the way to surgery so why waste time?
Patient is stable but the operation 100% going to fail? No point wasting time then is there?
High risk operation with excessive resource demands? To the morgue with you.
Low risk? Book him for surgery.
It genuinely is that simple. When you have patients in excess of 5+, it just becomes a case of queuing the patients by how stable they are, and how tired the surgeon is.
It can get dicey at times with the pressures of numbers of patients vs surgeons, but that's the point of triage, prioritising those you can save and unfortunately, discarding those who you can't.
2. The management is just a case of escalating pressures mixed with resource drain.
It is expensive to buy supplies, but creating them on site is mostly just refining one resource into another, and spending all day there with engineers staff.
You have huge supply deliveries initially - enough to cap out your warehouse (why?) and then eventually you get nothing, except more patients brought in via train. So, as you can see, you need to prioritise building your base to produce supplies (for surgery, and food for feeding everyone), and this is alright, you do have to make choices here.
Problem? You simply will never have any staff resources to spend to break any bottleneck, ergo half the upgrades are nearly pointless as you won't have any staff to work them. (I'm pretty sure this is a bug, because staff points were triggering through the tutorial phase, but on new games they no longer do.)
That means you're unable to really set up chains of production because you'll never have the staff to do so. It also makes shift work pointless for most staff because you'll never have anyone available to rotate shifts with in the first place. You're better off manually resting staff than leaving them on 12 hour shifts, as they'll be off resting when emergencies happen. (Also, why would you shift work nurses in the operating theatre? That would mean you have a nurse working there during non-operating hours at times because doctors don't work to a shift, they work on a per patient and tiredness basis.)
The result is a bit of dull gameplay loop - where you juggle supplies and ultimately, triage patients, but it's not really compelling because the progress is like a horse stuck in the mud, and endless grind of tedium. Rather than working towards optimising something, or breaking a bottleneck, it's just passing the time until you can get a staff member to even do anything with ~ for me, the balance is off. It's not even difficult, it's just... dull. And that's criminal in a video game.