Last but not least is Hospital Havoc 2, a game in which you play a (not-so-scrupulous) doctor treating the variety of odd patients who walk in the door. It reminds me a tiny bit of the card game Quack in the Box in the humor, though this one is heavy on jokes and light on actual medicine. It’s a bit of an odd one, though, and I’m still getting the hang of it.
You start off in medical school (represented on the map by a little wooden shack), in a very small one-room clinic, and the first section teaches you what you do with a patient: check them in, diagnose them, get them a prescription, treat them, discharge them. There’s an orderly who does some of the tasks for you, like administering the drugs you prescribed, emptying the trash, and changing the beds after the patient has been discharged.
Hospital Havoc 2: a reflection of our health care system.
As you progress, you earn experience points to level up, as well as cash that you can spend on things. For instance, you can add more beds or equipment, or you can buy otoscopes and band-aids that help you diagnose or treat patients more quickly. You can also buy power-ups for yourself or the nurse, making you move faster for a short amount of time or allowing you to chain a few moves. That’s one thing that’s really tough about Hospital Havoc 2 — by default, you can only tap to work on one thing at a time, so you have to wait until the doctor or nurse is done with their current task before doing anything else. When you can chain commands, there isn’t any indicator of what you’ve already tapped, and I haven’t figured out how to interrupt the chain to deal with a more urgent need that arises.
The patients and associated cures are bizarre and silly: there’s a guy with a misshapen head, and the cure is to paint up his face and turn him into a clown. The insomniac’s cure is a sheep that puts her to sleep. There’s a host of patients that you’ll meet, and they make funny comments while you’re seeing them — but a lot of the time you won’t have time to pay attention to that, because you’re running around trying to keep anyone from dying on you.
Speaking of which, patients die. Each patient has a meter that slowly runs down — if you don’t get them into a hospital bed in time, they’ll die in the waiting room and you have to clear them out. After they’re in the bed, the first time they’ll go into cardiac arrest and you can tap repeatedly to revive them. The second time that happens, though, they’re dead, and you just have to go dismiss the patient and have the nurse make up the bed for the next patient.
Hospital Havoc 2's loading screen – hope you don't have a needle phobia.
The game’s purchase structure is odd, too: it’s a free download for the entire game, though you can buy in-app currency known as “muffins.” I’m not sure why muffins, of all things, are the currency. (There’s also cash which you earn in-game.) When you buy equipment and power-ups, you can spend either cash or muffins. Muffins, however, are the only currency you can use to unlock later locations like the Doctor’s Office, Local Clinic, and Metropolitan Hospital — but you also have to have a high enough experience level before you can do that. I’ve had some free muffins that appear from time to time, but otherwise you can spend real money to buy packs of muffins.
As the husband of a family doctor, I probably appreciate health care humor a little more than some others might. The drudgery of medical school and residency is certainly an apt subject for a time-management game. Certainly the way many clinics are forced to run is a lot like an assembly line process. However, in the game it can be difficult at times to tell what a patient’s status is. There’s a little icon that blinks between two things: their current status and their attitude (happy, sad, angry). Unfortunately, the icon is small and it’s not always clear to me what they’re waiting on: is it the doctor’s turn to see them? Are they waiting for a prescription? The step-by-step process from admitting to discharging a patient is still a little murky to me, and the game can feel just a little overwhelming … kind of like medical school, actually.
Overall I think Hospital Havoc 2 has a lot to offer, but it’s a pretty big game. There’s the career play where you just go through and build up cash and experience points, but there are also scenarios that have you trying to do a particular task during a day, and offer different rewards for completion. But since it’s free to try, it never hurts to download it and check out the free portion to see what you think.
