War Hospital Review (Xbox Series X)

STAFF REVIEW of War Hospital (Xbox Series X)

Friday, August 2, 2024.
by Adam Dileva

We’ve all played War games before, most likely a Call of Duty or Battlefield, and while the combat side of War is often portrayed and shown, there’s a whole other aspect and angle that often gets forgotten but is just as important. Support units, specifically Medics, often don’t get the same spotlight as those fighting on the frontline. These brave soldiers may be wielding surgical tools instead of a weapon, but they are no less important than those trying to defeat the enemy, doing everything in their power to save their brothers in arms.

War Hospital is a sim game, but unlike others I’ve played. Here you’re in command of a hospital near the front lines, making constant life and death decisions while trying to protect yourself from an advancing enemy. A War themed game that doesn’t have you actually shooting anyone, instead trying to save a constant stream of patients, supported by the Imperial War Museum for even more authenticity. Even though it’s War themed, you’re trying to focus on the good you can perform by saving soldiers, but you’ll quickly realize not everyone can be saved.

It's the final year of the Great War, 1918, and you are Major Henry Wells, a retired combat medic, but you’ve been placed in charge of a field hospital near the front lines. You’ll have a constant flow of injured soldiers, not enough staff, and nowhere near enough supplies. But you’ll need to do what you can with what you have, as your allies are counting on you.

There’s actually a decent story to be had across three Chapters, not always something included in sim games. I found the difficulty of deciding who to save quite interesting, as you can read their bio cards, telling you about their history, married life, kids, etc. I’ll admit, I was more tempted to try and save someone that was married and had kids than someone that was not, so I could tell my own biases were creeping into my decisions.

Your main goal is to keep the camp’s morale up, though every time someone dies, gets denied treatment, or a slew of other reasons, it will go decrease. Treatment for soldiers is paramount, but this is difficult to do when you only have a handful of staff and nowhere near enough supplies. This is where you’ll quickly learn you’ll have to prioritize, not just patients, but staff and supplies as well. You’re constantly adapting, trying to do what’s best, but not everyone can be saved. Even though you might not be in the trenches, War is still hell for those at the War Hospital that need to shoulder this burden.

While the gameplay comes down to you pushing paper and making decisions, that doesn’t make the weight of those decisions any less, especially when a dozen patients all come in at once, yet you don’t have the staffing to treat them all. The more you treat, the more you can send back to the front line, but this also drains your supplies, as you have a very finite amount of resources. If you think simply hiring more staff is the solution, you’d be in the same thought process that I had, but I quickly realized that your increase of staff now needs more food, another resource to balance.

You’ll need to manage your staff, their fatigue, recruitment, supplies, everything pertaining to the camp, and it won’t be easy. You have Doctors, nurses, scouts, engineers, and more, all of which are specialized for certain tasks. But you need to make sure your staff aren’t overworked either, as they can only do so much before needing to rest. Fail to give them some time off and they’ll collapse of exhaustion, which takes even longer than a normal rest would have been in the first place.

You’ll constantly have to make hard decisions, choosing who lives or dies. A patient arrives in critical condition that will take 8 hours of surgery to complete probably doesn’t have a good chance at survival, as healing two or three soldiers that are in better shape is usually the better option unfortunately. This becomes more difficult if you choose to read the patient profiles, as you might be more inclined to save someone that’s married or has kids for example. I’ll admit, I was letting my emotions cloud my judgement at times, but once you figure out the best way for the gameplay loop, the profiles generally become irrelevant, as you’re simply trying to save as many as you can, regardless of their individual backgrounds.

A patient whose surgery has a high risk of failing probably isn’t going to get chosen over others I can guarantee survival. Things become much trickier when you have VIP’s admitted to your hospital though. Maybe saving a VIP is worth the risk, as you’ll usually be given a special reward if so. You’ll eventually have to think of the patients as numbers and risk assessments, simply weighing the surgery success percentages and discard the others unfortunately.

If you’re impatient like I am, you’re able to speed up, or completely stop time, but the faster time moves, the more you’ll have to deal with at once. If you’re critically short on supplies, you can order them, but they are quite costly and takes time for them to arrive by train. You’re better off having your engineers build certain buildings so that you can refine one resource into another, though this takes time and resources as well.

As you begin your first playthrough there is just enough tutorial hints that it helps you get started, but there could have been a lot more help. It wasn’t until my second attempt at the first Chapter where I really understood all of the mechanics and had a better go at it, as there’s little room for error. Again, morale reaching 0% is Game Over, and when you’re denying handfuls of patients care or even unable to bury them, morale can plummet quite quickly.

Even hours into my second campaign attempt, I was struggling with the controls. Being a PC game first and now ported to console, it takes some refinement to transition from a keyboard and mouse to a controller. While functional, some more work could have been done to make it more controller friendly. First off, there’s no cursor in the middle of your screen, so when you’re moving the camera around and wanting to click on a specific building, you have to kind of guess and sometimes zoom in so you can see the highlighted building to open its context menu.

Your main hotkeys are tied to the Left and Right Bumpers, but this takes some time to memorize where in the radial menu they are. I also found text a bit small, even on my large 65” TV. The worst offender though is trying to choose your doctors’ rest time, moving it between surgeries, as it sometimes felt like luck when I was finally able to move it. Trying to rearrange multiple surgeries was also a nightmare, not able to easily place them where I wanted without having to completely remove them from the schedule and starting over again.

Saving patients is your main priority, but that will only get you so far. You’re going to need to think longer term, needing a constant supply of resources. There’s a large skill tree that you can invest into, but this takes requisition points gained from saving patients. Sometimes you’ll want to send rehabbed soldier back to the front line, sometimes back to HQ, or maybe even discharge them, it really depends on your needs at any given moment. Engineers will build your researched options, as well as create medical supplies and more, though that means they need to work those shifts, something you’ll need to constantly adjust and balance.

My first game did not go well, as I had staff constantly passing out due to exhaustion. Sure, there’s a menu where you can check on all your staff, but I was so focused on the incoming patients that I forgot. You can eventually set shifts later on, but I found it was simply better to do manually once you get a hang of the controls and know what menus to check up on. By my second campaign I figured out the best course of action and was having much more success, though I wish more strategy was taught to me in the beginning to help.

Being a strategy sim game, the overhead camera is typical for the genre, though every now and then you’ll get a brief cutscene of the frontlines at certain plot points. These cutscenes are actually quite dated and not done well at all. It’s not the focus, but it’s such a drastic difference from the majority of the game and simply doesn’t look great. The soundtrack and voiceover on the contrary is done well, and there’s just a looming darkness and despair from being so close to all the death and front lines.

My first playthrough was a harsh learning experience. I felt as though I was losing more patients than I was saving. Needless to say, I didn’t complete Chapter One my first time as my morale had reached 0%. My second playthrough went much better, as I learned I had to simply not make decisions with my emotions, playing a numbers game, knowing when to rotate staff and upgrading the necessary buildings.

Even understanding the game more, it was still quite stressful, as it should be. You’re not given much time at all to sit back and think, reacting and adapting as needed, hoping you’ll be able to save one more soul. Once you come to the realization than you can’t save everyone, you can play more strategically with your mind and not so much with your heart. Sometimes even when there’s a high chance of survivability, things go wrong, so you always have to prepare to pivot and adjust, as it seemed I would get an influx of patients when my doctors were finally getting some rest.

War Hospital tells tales worth hearing and shows a side of the Great War not usually thought about. While it may not be as exciting as being in the thick of battle in the trenches, it’s a unique side of War that’s equally as important. Do your best to prevent casualties of War, but prepare your heart for not being able to save many.

**War Hospital was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 7.0 / 10
Gameplay: 7.0 / 10
Visuals: 7.0 / 10
Sound: 7.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of War Hospital (Xbox Series X)

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