Hospital Hustle
A frenetically-paced time management game.
Hospital Hustle is another time management game from the good folks at Big Fish Games. In the game you’re given the daunting task of helping Nurse Sarah save lives in increasingly hectic hospitals with an assortment of wacky treatment stations and patient-pleasing power-ups!
The game starts out with Nurse Sarah fresh out of school and looking for a job. It doesn’t take long before she lands a job at a busy hospital and it’s up to you to make sure she maintains order. In the beginning you have the bare minimum - a waiting room, diagnostic center, and a quick treatment center. Patients will start walking in and sitting down in the waiting room. Little hearts above their heads determine their condition and give you some idea about priority for treatments. To diagnose a patient you simply click and drag them to the diagnostic center. Before long a thought bubble will appear above their heads indicating what kind of treatment they need. If it’s something that can be treated in the quick treatment center you can click and drag them to that. But if it’s something that requires that the patient needs a bed you will have to click and drag them to the ambulance for transportation to another hospital. Once you earn enough cash you can buy your own beds and treat such patients right there. Whether patients are in beds or a quick treatment center they will eventually need their charts or even antibiotics in which case you have to direct Nurse Sarah up to the desk at the front to pick those items up by clicking on them then clicking on the patients that need them. When patients are treated and leave Nurse Sarah will have to make up their beds and take the dirty laundry to the laundry bin by clicking on it.
Each level has a requirement for how many patients that need to be treated before the end of the shift. This requirement goes up with each level. As you can imagine the action starts to get pretty frantic before long, much like a real hospital. The waiting room starts filling up, the beds start filling up, and patients start getting testy! With the cash you earn at the end of each level you can buy additional beds, quick treatment centers, plants, soda machines, water machines, and so on to improve the hospital. Some of these objects can help increase the happiness of patients. You can choose to play in story mode or endless play mode. There’s also several different hospitals for Nurse Sarah to work in, each with their own unique look and challenges. The graphics are cartoony but cute and the game offers a nice variety of hospital-orientated sounds to immerse you in the frantic action.
You can play the game in full-screen or windowed mode and KeyStrokes works perfectly in windowed mode. However you’ll only need KeyStrokes to enter your name at the beginning. The rest of the game only requires left-clicks and left-clicks and drags. Since the pace gets pretty frenetic you’ll want to be able to perform such mouse actions very quickly and in succession therefore dwell-clickers might get frustrated.
Hospital Hustle is a simple concept but I did find it to be oddly addicting. It can also be rather humorous at times with some of the oddball conditions that patients get and some of the reactions they display due to their frustrations over waiting. Like myself I imagine that some of our readers are unfortunately accustomed to visiting hospitals and witnessing first-hand the chaos that often accompanies the experience. In this regard Hospital Hostile captures the atmosphere perfectly and transforms it into a pretty unique time management game experience.
Hospital Hustle is available for PC and Macs. A free 60 minute trial demo is available from the Big Fish Games website.
If you would like to purchase this game please support our website by clicking on the logo below to buy a copy for the platform of your choice.
Mac System Requirements:
- OS: 10.4, 10.5 (recommended)
- CPU: 1.83GHz
- RAM: 512 MB
PC System Requirements:
- OS: Windows XP/Vista
- RAM: 256 MB
- DirectX: 8.1
- Hard Drive: 123 MB
Paul Natsch
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