[Il Mulo]

Ravviviamo subito l'ambiente.

Stavo leggendo questa recensione negativa che c'è su Steam (al momento è considerata la più utile in assoluto), mi ha un po' abbassato l'hype...

Promising, but should probably be early access.

This is the only realistic hospital sim that exists to my knowledge. It is NOT theme hospital. The illnesses, diagnoses, tests, etc. are, as far as I can tell, accurate. I was definitely entertained for around 8 hours, which makes me even more sad that the game falls short in the gameplay department.

I really want to recommend this game, but it ultimately fails to have an interesting core gameplay loop or any progression. Also, there are usability issues that get more and more annoying the more you play. Long story short: wait for a while and see if it becomes more interesting, or wait for sale.

Here are some of the biggest issues I have encountered:

- There is no progression or gameplay loop. There is basically nothing to unlock. The only gameplay you have is to build rooms. No staff management, training, upgrades, etc. The game talks about these things, but they do not seem to be implemented in
a meaningful way. It boils down to this: you build a department (emergency, surgery, neurology, etc - 8 in total), you treat a patient, then you unlock the ability to hospitalize patients that visit that department. You now build a ward. Now you get 10 of those patients a day. You will always get exactly 10. There does not seem a way to raise that number. Your only way to grow is to build the next department. Which leads to the next problem

- All departments are the same. All diagnostic rooms can be build in 5x5 and consist of: examination table, light, biohazard waste, sink, desk, computer and 1-2 unique gadgets dependent on the room. So the 24 or so unique diagnostic rooms you can build are really just.. one. You can honestly copy&paste an entire department and then change the rooms to the one of the new department. You will have to switch a small number of gadgets out. Doctors offices and wards can be 100% copied. From the ingame materials, it seems like emergency and general surgery are somewhat fleshed out, and then the rest was added as filler. Well, at least you can optimize things right? Wrong:

- Every department needs their own common room, on-call room, nurses room, lab, waiting room, reception, corridor (!), and yes, even janitor room. If you have even one neurology office you NEED to build a neurology janitor room, and this janitor will only clean neurology rooms and corridors. I assume this is because the developer did not get pathfinding right. This leads to ridiculously inefficient and expensive hospitals. Instead of having one or two awesome labs with great technicians which you can keep close to 100% utilization, you get many small, (completely identical) ones, which are less efficient.

- Employees can not change rooms. Nurses in the nurse room and doctors in the on-call room are the only ones who can move through the hospital. Everyone else belongs to one room until you manually send them somewhere else. So lets say you want to keep one radiologist around at night to man your various radiology equipment. Not much is happening at night usually, so you don't need 6 technicians, right? Wrong. Every technician only mans one device, so you have to chose if you want to keep the X-Ray or the MRI working at night, or manually reassign the technician all the time. This leads to a large amount of personell overhead. Why technicians are unable to just move between rooms is beyond me. I assume it is due to a bug in how the work queues are implemented.

- The game does not tell you what's wrong if things stop working, which happens frequently. You can have a full staff of surgeons, surgery nurses, etc. and a patient will not be moved to surgery until the next day. Why? The game does not tell you. I had patients die because they could not be transferred into a completely empty ICU. Turns out that ICU corridors are impassable for some reason. It would be very helpful if the game gave you more information about what exactly is missing to perform a task. This expands to other areas of the game. You can select a department head. The tutorial tells you you should make sure to select the right one, but.. it does not tell you the effects of selecting a certain one, except a small mood buff. The game really should give you way more information to figure things out. I suspect, however, that many of these things are simply not implemented.

- UI issues. Take deleting objects for example, there is: delete wall, delete object, delete window and delete room. All seperate buttons in seperate menus. Selecting stuff is finicky, some parts of the UI blink and do not work at all.

- Bugs in general. ICU corridors are broken. Ambulances get stuck, etc.