User Reviews (1 - 9 of 9)

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Warning Do not buy this game!!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: August 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

don't be fooled like everyone else was when this game came out, first the company has stated that they will not provide a patch to fix the many problems that this software has, and it does have a lot, second the game is not as advertised there are only 4 hospitals and the only difference between them is the color, you can hire about 60 doctors and nurses but it does you no good when you only have 9 patience to treat at a time, not all of the diseases are available (but the staff to treat them are) the story mode is pointless, you can start a game set everything up and then leave and come back 2 hours later and nothing really has happen no staff complaining about anything no patience walking out, you can't make any staff do anything except the janitors you can tell them to clean up, but if there are 9 people waiting to see a dr, and your 60 doctors feel that they need to talk to the 30 nurses that you have you can't force them to see the patients and that happens a lot, after about the four day all the staff kinda stop working
don't just take my word for it go to the codemasters website and see how mad other people are for getting this game and all of the problems it has

Something improved but not revolutionary

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: September 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing HT on a gaming site and I was at first hesitant to play it. I saw all the negative reviews on many gaming sites. I must say it's not all that bad but it's all not that good also. I would give it 2 1/2 stars if I could. It's partly a recycled Theme Hospital by Bullfrog mixed in with some new stuff. The graphics are nice and the gameplay is decent but it wont keep you playing for many hours and it will quickly bore you. TH kept me busy for days and hours at a time.I recently reloaded it onto my computer. On an Intel Core2Duo sadly the game flies by lol.
Something good: The tutorial is excellent. If you didnt read the instruction manual, the tutorial is great for learning how to use the menus, building rooms, adding furniture, hiring staff, and knowing the ins and outs of the game.
HT's main theme is to build up a working hospital that you can make a profit while keeping your staff happy with each other. The 4 hospitals Codemasters mentions seems like no effort was put into this. They are the same hospitals but different colors. The diagnoses that you are faced are supposed to be comical and in a way they are. The machines in this game are very nice graphically and work nicely. In other words: they fit. Instead of making the room, you are given several choices to build prefitted rooms of different sizes. Not bad. I didn't miss the way rooms were created in Theme Hospital. Most of the rooms have a changing room and a desk preinstalled. You can add pictures, plants, clocks and wall hangings. The diseases are different and somewhat funny. The equipment to diagnose and treat are different and very detailed. There is a machine from Theme Hospital such as the X-ray machine that is in Hospital Tycoon. The wierd thing is if you have a popular and highly rated hospital, not many people come to your hospital. If you have a large staff they are going to be relaxing and its your dime! I counted 9 people in my hospital waiting to be treated and it got very boring. I remember in TH when I had a popular hospital, it was filled and was causing bottlenecks on my old Compaq at that time. The peeps are nice (not perfect but nice). Some of the routes they take is questionable. When you click on a person you can actually look from their point of view, follow them, and find out their vital statistics. You can also jumpt to first person point of view with your staff. It's a nice change.
What disapoints me is the fact that this could of been a teriffic tycoon game (many have failed with the name of tycoon). Sadly the bugs stated in previous reviews and the attempt to model the game after Theme Hospital with better graphics and somewhat different gameplay gets a grade in my mind: D. It could of reached for the stars (or should I say beds) and be a hit but it doesnt. The camera zooming needs to be reworked. You cant zoom out to far but you can zoom in pretty close. I would of liked to see a Trama and ICU wing, a parking lot, underground parking lot, and the allowance of creating wings within your hospital. For example: heart, foot, trauma, neonatal, and more. How about changing the uniforms of the staff. I liked it when you click on the staff, their picture ID card shows up but there is nothing you can do with it. Adding card entry zones would make the id cards usefull.
Unfortunatly, as I said before the game is more of a recycled Theme Hospital. If Theme Hospital had better graphics then yes, TH would destroy Hospital Tycoon. HT fails (but not a failure as E.R. the game)to living up to the hype and what Codemasters was marketing. HT has better graphics but the gameplay doesnt make you play it for hours. It would be nice if there were multiple floors including elevators (perhaps elevator banks that we are use to in real hospitals), hiring security, and performing real operations. I miss the game Life and Death where you treated patients and opperated on them if need be. No other game has ventured into what Life and Death did. Performing operations would of been a good addition to HT. The addition of shops and coffee shops could of been neat. Also instead of using comical sicknesses and diseases, why not put real life situations in it. Ive never seen IV's, oxygen masks, and syringes for blood tests. Has anyone ever been to the hospital and see the police bring in suspects? It would be great to see a baby wing in the hospital, heart disease center, ect. Make your hospital a specialty center. How about working in your own hospital but working up the ladder starting as a rookie nurse/intern doctor to resident, surgeon, chief surgeon, chief doctor. The game woudlnt end but at the top you would be relied on for purchasing supplies, balancing the budget, hiring and firing, making decisions, ect.
Part of me is tired of seeing comical diseases and illnesses but thats just my opinion. I love simulation style games and really pinpoint how a simulation style game should or could be.
In conlusion, Hospital Tycoon seems more like a 2007 version of Theme Hospital but with better graphics. For me, I would own both. But I certainly wouldnt pay $29.99 for Hospital Tycoon. I will wait till it goes down to $9.99. I think I paid $19.99 for Theme Hospital more than 10 years ago. If more NEW content and expanded then $29.99 price would be justified. So Ive been playing it free online.
All and all its an ok game but doesnt add much fromm Theme Hospital which was a big hit more than 10 years ago and still has a loyal following (Im one of them). When I first saw the pictures and read the previews of HT, I was excited to see that Theme Hospital got an update and looking for it to make a splash and go off on its own tangent. I was dissapointed. Hopefully the makers of HT will listen to the reviews and improve it. It's a decent foundation but it could be better. If you have Theme Hospital, dust off the cobwebbs and reinstall it. This game will make you do it. I'd wait for the price on HT to go down to $9.99 but hopefully a Hospital Tycoon 2 will be announced. I didn't think the game was that bad, but it wasnt a shiner!

It Worked For Me, But...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

My copy of this game worked OK after some initial bugginess, so I do not share the same concerns expressed by the earlier review.

I guess my concern is that even the fully-functional version is not highly playable. Once you run through the play scenarios, which honestly does not take all that long, you end up in "sandbox" mode, which is highly repetitive and does not contain many variations.

On the plus side, the animations and graphics are fun, and the diseases and equipment are witty, too.

Keep your money in your pocket - at least until the developers come up with something much more variegated and playable than this is.

DON'T BUY THIS!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: October 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game after weeks of wanting it so badly. I love tycoon games like this. School Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, etc. And this idea really appealed to me. But after getting it home and trying for an hour to get it to load up I became frustrated and gave up. It would load up Storybox mode halfway and then completely close down and say there was an error with my memory. I even had to clear up some disk space to supposedly get this running but no such luck. This requires 619 MB (I believe...) and wouldn't run but I later installed The Sims which requires somewhere in the thousands MB and it works great. Don't buy this game! It's a POS!

great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

i loved this game! a lot of people complain about glitches but i haven't encountered any at all. i love the new twist on tycoon games, this one is seriously tricky near the end! if i were someone looking for a good, fun game to play but one that you don't have to play all the time to be good at, i'd buy this one (like i did!).

Bought on a Thursday, finished by Monday

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I bought this on impulse - I've loved Theme Hospital for years (but never managed to complete it), so thought this was worth a try. Plus it was dead cheap.

I was addicted almost straight away. I played it for 2-3 hours every night, sometimes longer, until I was quite literally dreaming about it. Yes, there are some annoying bits in Hospital Tycoon. The worst was the 'hospital' soap opera episodes, which happen every time you pass a level and at the start of each level. They're mostly nonsense, there's no relation to the rest of the storyline, they're just really pointless. The Sim-like talk was gibberish, although some of the simlish phrases were hilarious, and I would end up repeating them.

There are more inventive diseases and equipment than in Theme Hospital. My favourite piece of equipment was probably Hanging Therapy, which was used to cure Monkey Nuts. Go figure. Some of the other diseases include Lightbulbia, Mummyfied, Stress Zombosis, and many others. My one complaint was that there were only three levels, all of which are quite passable until the final one, and that only a certain few patients came into the hospital. (OK that was two.) I never saw any of the werewolves in the final level. (Hint: if you wanna get your capability up for the last level, and get a five star rating, try training lots of doctors to 100% at once.)

There's no lasting gameplay to Hospital Tycoon. There's no major challenges - just don't go onto the sandbox mode, it's dire - and once you know how to do everything, the hospital runs itself. You only need to chase a couple of patients around when the skull appears above their heads! There are some funny moments too - the most memorable is when someone's sick and the janitors fall flat on their backs. There's more to do than in Theme Hospital, but unlike this, I keep going back to Theme Hospital, as I'm desperate to complete it. I never will, I always get stuck at the epidemics. Maybe one day.

In the meantime, buy Hospital Tycoon cheap, and complete it in no time. All the reviewers who are giving this a bad review - tell me how to complete Theme Hospital please! Or at least get me past the major epidemics level.

Great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Music is jazzy in this vamped up theme hospital-like game. Overall I enjoy it, it's simple and fun to treat the patients! I must say the AI could be a little better when it comes to managing the hospital and treating patients in a timely fashion.

Much less fun than Theme Hospital

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I played this game in storymode for a day or two. Here are my main points of criticism:
* There is an aerial view, but you can't use it to place new rooms.
* Staff is hard to direct; you can't just pick them up and place them where they're needed.
* The music is unimaginative and the assistant's Sims-like jabbering very annoying.
* You can't speed up a patient's progress through the hospital by moving them up in the queue.
* The cutscenes are too long and have little to do with what you're trying to accomplish.
* You have no influence on how funds are spent.

All in all the game is rather unchallenging (at least in storymode). You don't really have to manage the hospital. Once you have built the required rooms and staffed it, it basically runs itself (although that might be different in other game modes).

Although it is much older, Theme Hospital is much more fun to play. I wish they'd come out with an updated version!

I hope I'm not the only one this happened to...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

None of the reviews mention it, the product specifications don't mention it, and the picture of the jewel case is too small to see it...but this game is meant for "PC-DVD" play, which I didn't find out until I received the package and saw the label clearly in the lower left corner. Not all of us have DVD-ROM drives! My computer couldn't even read the disk! I'm always careful to read the specifications before I purchase a computer program; if I'd realized my computer didn't fit the bill I wouldn't have bought the game.

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