Two Point Hospital Review – A Bittersweet Pill

Medical careers are highly rewarding, but they can also be stressful, tedious, and full of high-stakes choices. Two Point Hospital dramatically diminishes those stakes, because in this topsy-turvy world, patients contract diseases like Premature Mummification and seek treatment in cartoonishly large injection machines. Like real hospital work, managing this network of treatment centers is satisfying – but Two Point Hospital can’t do away with the tedium of routine.

Two Point Studios is composed of ex-Lionhead and Bullfrog developers who previously worked on franchises like Fable, Theme Park, and Populous. Over 20 years ago, its core team created the beloved management sim Theme Hospital, and now its creators are back for more hospital hijinx with a long-awaited spiritual successor that matches the goofy tone and deep management layers of the original.

Playing Theme Hospital isn’t a prerequisite for Two Point Hospital. The opening hours do a nice job easing in new players. You manage every aspect of a hospital, including hiring (and firing) doctors, constructing new treatment wards, and ensuring that your patients remain at a comfortable temperature. Two Point Hospital features a variety of interlocking systems, but I never felt overwhelmed. The game does a great job notifying you about problems that deserve your attention, like when I needed to hire more janitors because my hospital was a garbage pit, or when my nurses felt underpaid and became disgruntled.

Your ultimate goal is to travel to every hospital in the county and improve their overall ratings. The easiest way to turn a death pit into a three-star hospital is by completing missions. Early on, these simple tasks ask players to cure a certain number of patients or build a specific facility. These goals get more interesting after you unlock marketing, training, and research facilities. At one point, I was tasked with curing 10 patients of lycanthropy, but patients with that disease weren’t checking into my hospital, so I ran a marketing campaign to attract new patients and researched a better treatment to improve my hospital’s reputation. After that, my beds filled quickly.

Two Point Hospital’s management layers are deep. You can micromanage your employees’ break times and pore over profit/loss spreadsheets. This level of detail feels like boring paperwork, but like most hospital records, they are a necessary evil. Two Point’s automated systems keep your hospital running, but if you want to max out your facility’s efficiency and earn a three-star rating, you need to scrutinize these stats. At one point, as I looked over my staff sheet, I discovered that one doctor was killing more patients than they were helping, so I quickly axed them and hired a more skilled surgeon.

I had more fun building new treatment wings and decking the halls with surreal paintings. My early hospitals all looked similar. As I progressed, I unlocked new medical equipment and currency used to purchase new decorations and novelty items. As I gained a wider range of decor, I felt a greater ownership over my hospitals. The simple click-and-drag interface also allows you to move entire rooms around within a building (even after they’ve been constructed), so mistakes are easy to paper over, and massive remodeling projects are a snap. Even late in the game, I was tinkering with the layout of each ward. I enjoyed designing each GP’s office around a specific theme, and my patients were pretty happy when I added a mini-arcade to the waiting room.

While I loved playing interior decorator, I quickly grew tired of doing it over and over again. Each time you move to a new location in Two Point County, you have to rebuild your hospital again from the ground up. Late in the game, it can take an hour or more just to get your hospital to a point where it meets all the basic functions. Since the game has over a dozen hospitals, you spend a lot of time reliving the basics. This slog is necessary to unlock new treatment rooms and tools, so I always felt the pressure to move on to a new hospital and start from scratch.

Two Point Studio has done a remarkable job reviving Theme Hospital and repackaging its concept for a modern audience. I loved Two Point’s distinct charm and the thrill of researching treatments for absurd diseases. But the tiresome grind eventually wears down even the best parts of the experience. Like an actual hospital visit, I’m glad I went, but I’m not particularly excited to return.

 

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Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 Review – Moments Of Magic

Control has always been one of the masterstrokes of the PES franchise – particularly the ability to express yourself on the pitch, making even those small touches of the ball important. PES 2019 continues this glorious tradition in new ways, but it’s juxtaposed by the A.I., which is out of your control, predictable in its attack, and executes questionable transfer business. PES 2019 hits more highs than previous iterations, but it’s also bumping up against its own ceiling.

Last year, PES slowed its gameplay speed down, which made it feel better and more exacting, and this year expands the level of detail with the way players react – sometimes unsuccessfully – to the ball. The added variance in passes, even when they go slightly astray, introduces a realistic dynamic to the game. It’s exhilarating to see your striker try to control the ball with an extra touch on the outside of his boot while he’s on the full gallop. Even when he subsequently fires the ball into the side netting because the angle got worse as he quickly approaches the byline, it’s a nice dose of realism. I liked having to be more aware of how players receive passes, their fatigue level, and even that a through ball may go out of bounds, further separating the good players from the average.

The gameplay still has its faults, however, such as how players’ legs clip through each other and how pre-determined animations can take away some control. Unlike last year, it feels like player switching can sometimes leave you at a disadvantage because of whom you’re given. The A.I. also wears out its welcome in that its attack is predominately down the flanks, and defenders can switch off at times.

The A.I. further exposes its faults in the Master League career mode, because it’s unable to steward non-player-controlled teams through transfer windows without dangerously thinning the squad depth in some positions while going on a spending spree for others. Similarly, transfer amounts don’t reflect the craziness of the real world, and old stars (and even good-but-not-great players) hold on to their value too much in comparison with hot up-and-comers.

This is a shame because the mode offers a lot of depth when it comes to building a squad of champions. I like the team roles that give bonuses for the whole squad, the ability to direct whether funds go into you transfer or salary budgets, and the new manager missions (in Master League’s Challenge setting) that task you with goals from the owner.

The mode is great about assembling your team and training them up, but it’s not as good at doing the same for the rest of the league. It’s not a question of just having more or certain league/team licenses. It’s that the world outside of your team doesn’t come across nearly as well. This comes down to not only the A.I.’s transfer behavior, but players’ listed personalities don’t manifest themselves in being unsettled and wanting a transfer, and fans, rivalries, and the larger league context barely give the mode a broader focus. 

It remains to be seen how a larger scope might affect this year’s MyClub fantasy mode, which needs more post-launch competitions and other competitive and even single-player ways to play than last year. Like Master League mode, it’s fun to grow your team through training (as opposed to lusting after the card du jour), but even with the awesome co-op play, it stalls if you have to grind the same tournaments and ranked matches.

It’s easy for me to sit and revel in what I love about PES, jogging through instant replay just to gawk at a foot flick a ball on to a teammate or charting out the future of my Master League club. But occasionally that reverence is broken by an ill-suited moment that illustrates that more work needs to be done. The franchise is steps away from greatness, which makes some of its foibles frustrating.

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The Messenger Review – A Tale Of Two Games

Retro throwbacks are a dime a dozen these days, with independent developers paying loving homage to the games they grew up with. The Ninja Gaiden-inspired action platformer The Messenger accomplishes this feat while simultaneously subverting the genre in multiple ways.

The Messenger puts you in the tabi of a young ninja chosen to fulfill a prophecy and combat a curse overtaking the land. The 2D adventure tasks you with traveling through myriad diverse regions on your way to the frozen peak. During your travels, you must conquer death-defying platforming sequences that require precision controls. Whether you’re jumping from ledge to preciously placed ledge or unsheathing your sword into the face of an enemy, The Messenger’s controls are as tight and responsive as they come.

You start with a basic moveset of jump and attack, with the ability to cloudstep, an extra mid-air jump granted each time you perform a successful attack. That small restriction on double jumps sets you up for intricate sequences of slashing enemies, projectiles, and environment items to cross long gaps or collect currency suspended over spikes. This simple moveset carries with you through the game, but your arsenal expands with access to new abilities like climbing and gliding. My favorite acquired ability is a grapple rope, which latches on to nearby enemies, walls, and hooks, opening a host of thrilling platforming opportunities.

You can acquire several other upgrades by trading in time shards you collect during your travels. Time shards are obtained by exploring levels, defeating enemies, and smashing environment items. The upgrades range from invaluable abilities like being able to destroy enemy projectiles to quality-of-life luxuries like revealing the locations of hidden collectibles. Filling out the upgrade tree is rewarding and makes collecting as many time shards as possible an essential goal.

The Messenger may be a love letter to the action platformers of yesteryear, but it modernizes the formula in multiple ways. One of the biggest upgrades is foregoing the traditional extra lives and continue systems. Instead, each time you die – and you’ll likely die a good amount – a minion named Quarble resurrects you at the last checkpoint. However, he doesn’t do this out of the goodness of his heart; he follows you around for a bit after you respawn, stealing away any time shards you collect until your debt is paid. I vastly prefer this approach to respawning over the antiquating lives system, as this prevents frustration from losing too much progress while also making each death consequential. Quarble also makes amusing, fourth-wall breaking remarks upon each death. It doesn’t happen often, but the characters you interact with throughout the world often deliver humorous dialogue that pokes fun at you, as well as standard conventions of the action-platform genre.

Once you progress far enough, you unlock the ability to travel forward in time thousands of years. This leap is represented by a move from 8-bit to 16-bit graphics. When you emerge into the future, the backgrounds are lush and immediately noticeable, and while the character sprites receive noticeable upgrades, they aren’t as jarringly different as expected. The areas are largely the same in both periods of time, but some walls and ledges are in different places, leading to exciting, yet simple puzzles as you jump between the graphical styles to coordinate to progress through a screen.

Tearing through the first half of The Messenger is among my favorite experiences all year. Its curated, linear format delivers a perfectly paced adventure that had me itching to play the next stage each time I vanquished the prior level’s boss. Every time a checkpoint rewarded shuriken and health, I felt a mix of dread and excitement as I readied for the challenge ahead. Each boss challenges you in unique ways, ranging from massive monsters with lasers and projectiles to smaller adversaries that jump around the screen and attack you up close.

 

Halfway through the game, The Messenger throws a massive curveball your way in the form of a genre shift. The adventure changes from a linear, stage-based experience to a Metroid-inspired game with labyrinthine areas, fast travel, and riddles hinting at where to find collectibles needed to reach the final area. I typically enjoy this brand of exploration-based platforming, but the whiplash-inducing change disrupts the pacing and swaps out a tight formula that was working well for one that, while functional, is less fun.

In doing away with the linear structure, The Messenger instead relies on clues given by a character. While some hints are obvious, others had me running in circles for a while before I figured them out. You can pay a few hundred time shards to decode the riddle and place a marker on your map (I often opted for this method), but if you want to save up shards for the newly expanded upgrade tree, you have some tough decisions to make. Fortunately, by the time I found all the collectibles, I had collected enough shards to max out the skill tree before the final trek. After a hefty helping of back-tracking through areas you already played through in a better format, you finally return to a style resembling the first half of the game.

While the Metroidvania approach doesn’t play into The Messenger’s strengths as much as the linear stages, it’s far from a deal breaker. Regardless of its mid-game identity crisis, tight controls, excellent platforming, and exciting combat make The Messenger a retro journey worth embarking on.

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