Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward (Wii) - Review by Chris

Introduction

With such an easily accessible interface and with it being as close as a console has come to replicating the feel of a computer mouse in terms of a controller, the Wii hasn't exactly seen a huge influx of strategy titles. It's a strange predicament because, as already stated, the controller is clearly something that would be put to good use in the genre. We have seen a more recent influx of titles in the genre from bigger developers but even the smaller ones are taking notice of the gap in the market and as such, Oxygen Games have published Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward for the Wii, courtesy of development from Gameinvest.

Gameplay

Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward is a strategy title with a twist. Whereas normally the strategy titles will place you in control of an army of people, here you'll only have real control over one person, and that is a male or female nurse, depending on which you pick when you start the game, who is a post graduate looking for work in a hospital. After numerous rejection letters, you'll finally find a job advertisement for a nurse at Maryville Hospital. And, after a very brief phone call, you're hired and on a flight to your new workplace. The object of the game is to help patch up incoming patients to the game's 7 available hospitals, which you'll progress through after you help them gain a 9 star rating. To actually do this, you'll pick up the patients with the on screen cursor and move them from the waiting area to the diagnosis area. After a couple of seconds, the treatment will be decided and a bubble over the patients head will tell you where you next need to move them. To begin with, your only thing you can do to patients is move them to the treatment area where they are merely bandaged up before leaving. However, as you progress through the days at the hospitals, new problems begin to prop up and until you unlock the ability to heal these, all you can do is place the patient into one of the ambulances parked outside the hospital where they'll be taken to a medical centre that has the requisite facilities to treat them. Further treatments made available throughout the game include the likes of beds, for patients who are running a fever or need rest, an X-ray machine for helping with broken bones or a theatre for more serious health problems.

And while you will have to manage the patients around the hospital floor with the cursor, you'll also have to make use of your male or female nurse which you decided upon before playing. The nurse is there to bring bandages or medicine to the patients but because patient admittance is staggered, you'll have to juggle this with the cleaning of treatment areas and beds. This is partly where the management element comes in because for each day in the hospitals, you have a set number of patients to cure and making key use of the time and the facilities available is going to be key to progressing through the days and for helping the hospital gain its 9 star rating. It becomes increasingly manic as patient healing numbers increase across the days or as new 'disasters' happen meaning you'll have to be juggle larger number of patients than normal. You'll also have to manage the hospital floor prior to the start of each day and this involves choosing which facilities should be made available to the patients. This further element of strategy along with the patient management can get frustrating and quite manic as the game does throw more and more patients as you and, of course, the diseases continually become more complex and so you'll start cursing the fact that your hospital is so small and can only hold so many pieces of equipment and that you only have one nurse. It's a double edged sword in terms of gameplay then because strategy fans should enjoy the constant managing of everything going on on-screen but many others will find it difficult to manage. And the fact that after a couple of days most of the facilities are available for the hospitals means things do stagnate as you progress.

Controls

The Wii-mote is perfect for this style of gameplay yet while the overall setup does work, it doesn't work as well as it could. It's incredibly simplistic with only the A button and the Wii-mote's pointer capabilities being used. You'll select and pick up patients by hovering the cursor over them and pressing and holding the A button but unless you hold the cursor exactly over the head area then it doesn't work and so becomes immediately frustrating especially when you consider that you have a set quota of patients to heal for each day. To move your nurse around the hospital to undertake various tasks, you'll simply point at where you want them to go or what you want them to do and then they'll do it and the controls allow for a stacking of commands so that you can divert some of your time away from the nurse to sorting out your patients. Yet, much like the moving of patients, the controls require pixel perfect placement of the cursor to work and it is just annoying especially when some objects are small and hard to select. Some lenience in the selection would have been nice.

Graphics

The game presents itself in two distinct ways. The cutscenes for the game are all hand drawn and look respectable but they sit in the middle ground in terms of quality in comparison to other titles. Yet, they look considerably better than the in game graphics which look like those seen in PC titles from over 10 years ago. The in game graphics are presented in an isometric 3D style which is very basic and shows little in the way of detailing. The character models for the patients and the nurse are presented in a similar basic style, with the animations being static and very robotic. It's clearly not pushing the Wii's capabilities but the developers could have done a better job of making it look better than it does.

Sound

There's not a huge amount of sound or even music to try and ease the frustration that the title brings. In some cases, it'll cause more irritation. There are loudspeaker announcements every so often and none of these bear relevance to the actual gameplay and because they are repeated on a loop, you'll just wish for them to shut up. There is a nice little touch in the audio department from the patients though that occurs when you pick them up and you'll hear them saying things like 'What's going on?' and it does reel back some of the artificial-ness of the game.

Final comments

The Wii isn't home to many strategy titles but those that it does have are all significantly better than this. To give them their dues, Gameinvest clearly aren't trying to compete with those titles but Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward gets so frustrating and annoying thanks to control issues and the game's ability to constantly pile on the pressure while only giving you one character to help out. There is a good idea behind the title but Gameinvest haven't done the best in bringing that to the forefront with this particular execution not being of the highest standard. Still, if you enjoy strategy titles and own a Wii then you may find some fun here, providing the price of the game is right.

Pro: Provides a stiff challenge for those that like it, interesting gameplay idea...
Con: ...which unfortunately suffers from poor execution, graphics and sound are of a poor quality and there are control issues that dog the game
Final score: 4.3

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