In Hysteria Hospital you are a newly trained nurse, hot out of training school and ready to take on a new job, sadly most of the hospitals in the area are shockingly understaffed and badly organised so you have been asked to take over from the previous nurse and sort things out. Your job is to pretty much run, which includes taking patients to different wards, giving them drugs and making sure the correct equipment is installed.

 

The main game mode is set over seven hospitals, each one getting slightly worse than the last. The aim is to earn 9 stars in each hospital then once this is done you have done your job and can move onto the next nightmare. You earn stars by ensuring a set amount of patients are seen to in the time given. Each hospital has a Triage Doctor and a pharmacy already installed. The idea is that when a patient is in the waiting room you pick them up and take them to the Triage Doctor. He will issue the patients notes and diagnose them. At the start of each level you are able to purchase equipment from the funds you have earned from the previous level. Initially you just need to purchase a bed so patients can recover. So after the diagnosis you pick up the patient and take them to the bed. At this point you then have to run over to the pharmacy and get their notes which you put on their bed, occasionally they may require drugs so you have to run back to the pharmacy. Whilst all this is happening another patient will be waiting to be seen and the Triage bed will need to be made ready for more patients and so begins the real hook of the game, multi planning on a massive scale. As you progress through the game you will need to purchase more equipment like more beds, serious wounds unit and a dentist so you will find yourself running around making beds, collecting notes and placing loads of patients whilst they slowly get more ill.

 

To ramp up the difficulty the later hospitals have multiple floors so you need to place patients into lifts and the collect them on their new floor, where there will be other specialist units to look after them plus later on items have the ability to break down, requiring you to go and collect a spanner to repair them. The multitasking can get really confusing and many a level will be lost due to bad planning. Thankfully there are a few areas where you can spend cash to speed up the waiting time on patient notes, quicker repairs and also spruce up the waiting room so you don’t get people getting too ill whilst they wait. The commands to your nurse are also stackable so you can click on many items at once and let them run around whilst you plan your next set of moves.

 

Hysteria Hospital is essentially a point and click disaster management game, with quick grabbing and pointing of the Wii-Mote or a tap of the DS touch screen being the aim of the game. Sadly at points in the Wii version I found it hard to grab a character or pick up drugs to give to a patient, causing me to lose vital time and miss out on the level bonuses.

 

The game is presented in an isometric view, giving you a good overall view of the whole floor, when you move up a floor you no longer see what is going on elsewhere so speed is of the essence.

 

The graphics are not ground breaking in either version but look good enough for the game, however they do get reused an awful lot, with most hospitals looking like each other. Even the speech is repeated a bit too much, with only a small amount of character voices being used and a really annoying announcement cracking the worst hospital jokes I have ever heard.

 

Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward is an engrossing title for the first few hours of play but the repetitive nature and the occasional bad control issues cause the game to lose most of its puzzle like appeal. The previous reasons and an overly high RRP of £29.99 for the Wii version means that this is a title that you should probably rent first.