Typically, war tends to manifest itself in video games as either offerings in the first-person shooter or strategy war genre, with often little thought given beyond what happens when you pull a trigger and your enemy dies in front of you. As if the name wasn’t a big enough tell, War Hospital aims to show the wages of human conflict from different vector, prompting players to confront the question of what happens after the violence has ended and a brave group of often forgotten people must pick up the pieces with whatever they can.
War Hospital PS5 Review
An Unpolished But Entertaining Strategy Offering With A Harrowing Heart
Of course, there is probably no more effective example of this scenario than the First World War where some 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded were recorded as the result of the conflict, resulting in a veritable catastrophe of care for the overworked and under-resourced hospital and medical staff that would have to make some often soul-shattering choices about who to save based on the level of care available. War Hospital dives straight into this scenario, putting players in charge of a beleaguered war hospital near the end of the war as you seek to heal and care for as many souls as you can.
From the get-go it’s quite clear that War Hospital is a rather limited offering – at least in terms of available modes anyway. With no online multiplayer, skirmish or custom scenarios to be tackled, War Hospitals proffers just its single-player campaign for players to get stuck into. Once you get started, what is also equally clear is that War Hospital could do with a whole heap of polish. Sure enough while it doesn’t have the highest production values in the world, the isometric visual presentation is also nothing that couldn’t have been achieved on PS4 (or possibly even PS3). This is a fact that makes War Hospital’s performance issues and constant judder that you get from rotating the camera feel somewhat egregious to say the least – though War Hospital never feels unplayable as a result of these technical foibles.
Jumping feet first into War Hospital’s campaign, your mandate, as you may well guess, is to save as many souls as possible while the Great War rages on the doorstep of your camp. Predictably, it’s not as easy as putting a band-aid on folks and kicking them out of the door, as War Hospital requires you to manage the infrastructure at your disposal to provide the optimum amount of care possible. What this means is that not only will you be ensuring that you have the right number of nurses, surgeons and medical crew to take care of your patients, but so too you’ll have to make sure that you have sufficient engineers on hand as well to repair and upgrade your various caregiving structures.
Beyond that, you’re also tasked with ensuring that the day to day running of the titular War Hospital also occurs with a steady hand. This means taking care of assigning the correct teams of surgeons to first-line care roles, ensuring that you have engineers creating enough medicine to sedate and care for the injured, making sure that you have sufficient nurses available to rehabilitate recovering soldiers and, somewhat inevitably, giving consideration to having enough folks available to not only move the injured back and forth, but also to lay the dead at rest in the nearby cemetery.
There’s also a fair amount of micro-management to be carried out too. When you’ve got just a couple of surgeons and they’re both beginning to tire, you need to prioritise incoming causalities in terms of their mortality, pushing more critical patients further up the line, while potentially delaying operations for more healthy individuals. Most pressingly, your medical teams (who essentially do a wealth of administration tasks from carrying patients from one structure to another, to burying the dead and more) and your engineer teams (who can create life-saving medicines and improve your structures), also need to be constantly re-assigned to different tasks to ensure that the whole enterprise runs as smoothly as it can.
As the overall manager of the hospital and its surrounding structures, you’ll also be required to intercede in a range of emerging situations, such as choosing which shortcuts surgeons can take in their care of patients (which often correlates to better care resulting in a longer stay time, with the other choice having the opposite effect), to making other decisions which can affect your overall moral standing in the hospital. Annoyingly though, War Hospital’s user interface can often prove clumsy to deal with, specifically in that that you have icons which appear at the edge of the screen that are supposed to signify certain things but there is never any text telling you what it is and you have no mouse cursor to hover over it anyhow.
The kicker with War Hospital is the fact that you *never* have enough resources – human or otherwise – to help as many folks as you would like and so the unavoidable result of this is that lots of people die despite your best efforts. Playing directly into this is the fact that not only are resources hard to come by (Staff Permits are by far the most uncommon resource you have as they allow you to pay for new personnel to be hired for the hospital), but the various nurses, medics and so on that you have slaving away trying to save the injured masses pouring back from the front can become compromised due to exhaustion and hunger, requiring that you afford them sufficient rest and sustenance wherever possible.
Of course, this is the point right? The Great War remains one of the most deadliest wars in human history and so having a strategy game where you’re absolutely up against it in terms of what’s expected of you, draining the resources that you have at your disposal and constantly exposing you to failure (and requiring you to bury them soon after), makes sense when taken in context with its subject matter. As if to further ram the point home, each soldier has their own identity and back story but because this only ever imparted in text form on the various patient cards that you get to inspect and you don’t get to see each individual soldier in any kind of close-up first-person or third-person perspective, you don’t really foster any sort of connection with them and so losing them has far less impact than it perhaps should.
Sitting atop the micromanagement of War Hospital is its progression system, whereupon by completing special objectives, such as sending more troops back to the front to repel an incoming attack, you can gain additional resources to kick off improvements to each building (every structure has its own improvement tree) to provide crucial upgrades like more successful surgeries, room for additional personnel and more besides. There’s certainly plenty to do in War Hospital and the occasional bouts of cinematic cutscenes and voice-over work help to propel a thin narrative framing which explains how and why you happen to be managing a hospital in the Western Front in the first place, but it’s also true that War Hospital’s scope is also deliberately smaller than that of other strategy games too, making it more suitable for genre newcomers as a result, rather than stalwart armchair tacticians looking for a more broadly scoped genre effort.
War Hospital is nowhere near the most sophisticated, nor the most polished strategy game money can buy, but it nonetheless does a commendable job of making you feel what managing an overwrought war hospital at the forefront of one of the most deadly wars in human history could be like. Though it’s relatively simplistic tactical beats might not appeal to expert strategists, War Hospital’s more narrow scope and poignant subject matter do make it a much more easily digestible proposition for both genre newcomers and perhaps more crucially, for first-person shooter folks who have ever given thought to what happens after they pull the trigger on an enemy soldier.
War Hospital is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly supplied by PR.