Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward Review

Let there be no doubt: the Nintendo DS is a fantastic handheld for casual gamers. Nintendo stormed the scene with the DS in 2004 to release games like Nintendogs, Brain Age and other games that appeal to a broad audience. With it they have gobbled up market share that Sony can only dream of having. Third parties caught on not long after. O-Games is the latest publisher on the Nintendo DS with Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward.

If you have ever played a game like Diner Dash then you have a good sense of what to expect from Hysteria Hospital. The two are fairly similar with the latter being clearly inspired by the former. Your job is to manage a hospital with patients coming in, machines needed maintenance and dirty bed sheets building up. It’s not easy to run a hospital you know!

The game mechanics of Hysteria Hospital are quite simple. You basically only have to coordinate everything that happens in the hospital by tapping on the touch screen. You accumulate cash based on the number of patients you serve, the amount of time it takes to see them and expenditures from staff, maintenance and the pharmacy. The expenditures can be adjusted up or down affecting the speed of the given task. With the money you gain from each level you can buy new equipment and sell old ones.

Each level sets a goal of number of patients you need to see and how much you need to make. A patient will enter and sit on the couch. From here you need to move them over to the desk to be checked out where they will be directed to a bed, x-ray or other piece of equipment. The nurse is tasked with retrieving prescriptions from the pharmacy as well as maintaining the equipment and changing the sheets. You do all of this by simply tapping the area you want the nurse to go and can tap multiple places in which he will do the next task in the order that you tap.

Each level will only last a couple minutes. It is a very easy game to play and can be somewhat entertaining, although I would stop short of calling it fun. Most of what you did is repetitious. Actually, all of it is. There is no real variety to shake things up. Another downside is the simple graphics and sounds that make this game look like something that could be played on a cheap cell phone. To be fair, it does retail for $20. Still, the Nintendo DS is capable of more.

Overall I would say that Hysteria Hospital is a casual game that probably does not appeal far beyond that. If you are a fan of Diner Dash and don’t already own that for the DS or PSP, I would recommend that you give Hysteria Hospital a look. Everyone else should probably pass this one up. There isn’t a whole lot to this game and even less to keep you coming back for more.