Review: Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward

Platform: Nintendo DS/DSi

Developer: GAMEINVEST

Publisher: O-Games

# of Players: 1

Rating: E(Everyone)

Official Site

Score: B-

Just as Tower Defense has spawned legions of clones, games such as Diner Dash have brought forth all sorts of fast-paced casual games across every platform where speed and timing are key in order to keep virtual customers happy and coming back for more. Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward takes this familiar formula and drops it into a medical-themed setting with over 60 levels of pill pushing, bed sheet changing, patient shifting total madness that can also be see as a playable analogy for the current health care system (if you choose to look at it that way). If you're a DS owner looking for a little excitement in the ER, now you can have all the fun of being a nurse without changing bedpans, consuming too much caffeine or pulling a double shift.

You can play as a male of female nurse who, right out of school, is snapped up by a very busy metroploitan hospital and put to work handling a heavy patient load. Gameplay is simple, but the speed at which events soon reach critical mass will test even the most expert players. In a nutshell, your nurse runs about on an isometric screen taking sick patients to be admitted and diagnosed then runs them to a waiting bed. Next stop, the pharmacist to get medicine for your new patiently waiting patient. Upon delivering and administering the medicine, the patient is healed after a short time, whereupon they need to be booted out of bed. After discharging the patient, the dirty sheets need to be gathered and tossed into a laundry bin. Rinse and repeat in faster and faster cycles and no, you don't get a break until the stage is complete.

Your goal is to earn cash and kudos for treating patients promptly, which nets you better paying, busier jobs at new hospitals in different US cities. Letting too many patients slip though the cracks (or leave all ticked off, actually) will cause you to fail the stage. The game also has a light simulation aspect in that as you increase in skill and gain new responsibilities you're also tasked with running the hospitals as you move on. You'll need to spend money carefully in one of four areas, making sure to balance out costs against any losses that occur. Did I mention that there's almost always a clock running during the game? How's that for workplace stress, Nurse Jackie?

There are two modes here, Play (Story) Mode and Endless, which is exactly what it says. Play mode is 63 levels of challenge set in hospitals from California to New York, but don't expect anything resembling total realism here. The game mixes in its quickly-paced healing with the simple economic system noted above and as long as you don't think too much about being shipped off to a new hospital after a boatload of now healthy patients survive your tapping and sliding skills, it's all good fun. Even better, there are no insurance forms to fill out and no medical suppliers to hand out logo-shaped notepads and pens to clog up your inventory.

A smart tutorial that shows you the ropes while dropping you into what's going to be quite a mental and physical challenge. Mental in that you'll need to keep track of patient patterns while dealing with new admissions as quickly as possible. Physical as in your stylus hand will get a Joe Wieder-style workout as you drag and tap your way to success or failure. Just as you're getting used to the game, it drops a new patient-mangling machine of some sort into a new map, keeping you on your toes for even more tense minutes of fun. As you clear stages, you're rewarded with an assortment of helpful items to keep patients hanging around and happy, a nice touch that keeps you hooked in for one more level.. just one more level...

Visually, the game goes for a simple anime-inspired style that works thanks to the clean lines and careful color work throughout. Sure, the hospitals here tend to look very much the same, but that's pretty close to reality, I've heard. Patients also tend to blend together after a while as well, but the game is a lot less about getting to know who's coming in than it it about getting them in and out as quickly as you can. The music and sound effects are well done and definitely don't pretend to be anything you'd really hear in an ER, although some of the comments healthy, sick and pissed-off patients make are good for a chuckle or two. There are cut scenes in Play mode that could have zipped by a bit quicker, though. As it is, they tend to linger longer for those slower readers out there, so get used to the downtime between missions. Heck, it's the only rest you get before that stylus gets to the tapping and dragging and such.

There's mo multiplayer mode in the game, which is a bit of a downer for this sort of game. Imagine how much fun it would have been to share the game with another player and perhaps see who could deal with a set number of sickies quicker? Or perhaps some sort of edit mode that would allow players to trade items or even custom hospitals? Ah well, that's what sequels are for, right? If there's any real issue with the game, it's that it eventually moves so fast that it seems impossible to beat at times. But that's what persistence is for and having known a few nurses over the years, I can safely say that there are few more persistent people in the workplace than nurses, that's for darn sure...

The bottom line here is Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward works quite well as a rapid-fire challenge gamers of all skill levels can pick up, play and enjoy right out of the box. Granted, the game's non-stop pace and liberal doses of humor keep it from being really "serious" stuff at all, but you're getting something with a bit of replay value if you end up liking what it delivers. If you know someone on the front lines of the medical field, they'll really get a hoot and a half out of this one - just don't hand them the game after a stressful shift or you'll probably be the one in the ER.