4Gamers – Review | Indie flash

During Gamescom, we already saw a hands-off preview of War Hospital, which is set during World War I. Unlike what we used to do during the war, we should not kill people now, but rather save them. You take control of a field hospital on the front line that is fighting hard to save soldiers.

The location you find yourself in consists of a number of buildings. So you obviously have the hospital, but also the infirmary, staff quarters, cemetery and more, for which you have to employ the right staff. You have a number of specialists that you can assign to the hospital and they can accept different patients. Of course they feel tired too and need to rest on time.

New patients are brought to you from the front lines and here you have to choose whether you will save them or leave them to die. You can do this based on their chances of survival, the time you have to spend on them and the resources you have available. The developer tries to make it more difficult for you by introducing stories to give more impact to the choices. Personally, we weren't bothered by this and played it quickly as a kind of spreadsheet simulation where we just looked at the songs and the monotony quickly set in.

You need medicine and food to survive and with engineers you can prepare supplies for that with nurses who can help when necessary. When the surgery is successful, the patient is transferred to the infirmary where he continues to recover. After the recovery period, you are given the freedom to choose what you want to do with the patient. This way you can send them to the front again, which is necessary to fend off incoming attacks, but you can also send them to HQ or Home, which can generate scripts or morale respectively.

Morale is important, because if it gets to zero it's gone. You can then exchange texts to receive new materials from HQ. You can also order new troops, but of course you must provide enough space for this through improvements to buildings or various actions that, among other things, simplify or speed up the work.

From Chapter 2 onwards, we had performance issues and the experience immediately became a lot less so. We had reached a certain capacity in the hospital in terms of doctors and it seemed like this was too much for the game. Looking at the Steam forums, we weren't the only ones and the developer has already noticed this. However, it's unfortunate that this has crept into the release, because there are still some bugs to be found, which fortunately don't immediately break the game.

Visually the title looks beautiful. This way you can switch between the view of the field hospital and the battlefield. The soldiers you send to the front lines also appear in the trenches, which is a nice detail. We could never get used to the UI and kept clicking to eventually get to the right one. There are also a lot of menus that you have to click to open to arrange everything. It quickly feels like a spreadsheet where you can arrange things between different tabs.