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War Hospital, out now, is a tug-of-war between empathy and efficiencyWorth a triage
Worth a triage
Image credit:Nacon
Image credit:Nacon
War Hospital | Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
War Hospital | Launch Trailer
You have to triage them so that the most pressing cases are seen first, guesstimating how long it’ll take them to deteriorate based on the UI’s calculatedly imprecise visual language, while also ensuring that your doctors, nurses and medics don’t work for so long that they collapse, which entails a lengthy recuperation period.
Triaging isn’t quite as simple as counting the number of bullet holes on the patient’s hospital card, though that’s the best place to start. Some may have more complicated injuries that use up more hospital supplies, and require longer operations. Others may be VIPs, whom your superiors would like you to prioritise. And all the while, more of them are arriving in a steady flow of writhing bodies on stretchers.
And then there’s the question of what you do with patients, once they’re healed. You can send them home to boost hospital morale, or send them to HQ in exchange for permits for those vital new facilities and upgrades. But more often than not, you’ll need to send them straight back to the front, which is depicted as a slowly advancing timeline with enemy attacks colour-coded for severity. The wounded soldiers sent your way are, in short, both clients of the game’s medical management system, and flexible raw resources. You aren’t so much healing the sick, as producing the healthy.
The overall result is a dreary but demandingstrategyexperience that challenges you to maintain empathy for those in your care, even as the simulation forces you to think of your patients and staff as, essentially, competing time signatures that must be ruthlessly synchronised or edited out. After a couple hours’ play, I think it’s an open question as to whether that reflects the World War period, or is a product of a modern management philosophy also applicable to cosier simulators like, say,Restaurant Tycoon 2.
War Hospital’s period portrayal is meticulous – the maps are intricate studies of tumbledown houses, roads and railways – but it’s also deeply cliched, with its elegantly washed-out photography and loading screen Emile Zola quotes, which makes it easy enough to strip the presentation away and perceive the mechanics in the abstract. Speaking for myself, the only things that really ground me in the setting are the occasional screams you hear from the operating wards and clearing tents. These made me reluctant to zoom in too close – an interesting complication of the top-down perspective.
