Hollywood Hospital 2

Hospital A&E wards should, in theory, be the ultimate location to set a time-management game in. With human life itself frequently at stake, there's enormous pressure to get diagnoses right and treatments done quickly.

Hollywood Hospital 2 purposefully sidesteps any hint of bad taste by having its patients subjected to strange illnesses that make them resemble super-deformed versions of Hollywood stars in character like Braveheart or Jack Sparrow.

Unfortunately, it also sidesteps any form of pressure as well

The aim of the game is simple – cure the patients that walk through the hospital doors as quickly as you can.

True to the time-management genre, this means shuffling people from one part of the ward to the other, making sure they’re checked by the doctor, put in the treatment machines, and placed in the recovery bed.

Each patient’s illness has to be cured by engaging in a short mini-game, which varies between picking out the right coloured pills in sequence to slapping someone around the face until they snap out of it.

They’re pretty silly and help give the game a nice dollop of extra character in a genre that tends to stick rigidly to the prescribed formula.

Another way in which HH2 leaves its unique mark is through its controls, which focus on selecting the patients rather than moving an individual around the screen.

There are occasionally some issues with this, however. When trying to manage which illness gets treated by a specific doctor on later hospital layouts, it can be a little bit too easy to accidentally select the waiting chair.

The cursor also has a habit of selecting patients that are on their way out despite the fact you can’t do anything with them.

The main issue with Hollywood Hospital 2 isn’t so much the occasionally flaky controls, but more the pacing of the game.

As this is a time-management game through and through, you’d expect some sort of juggling of priorities and panic-inducing moments to keep the adrenaline high.

However HH2 takes almost ten of the 25 levels before it even starts throwing more than two people (widely separated) into the hospital at once, making it all feel a little like a procession through a production chain, rather than a sweaty balancing act.

Even in the latter stages of the game, with its multiple seats, doctors, and beds, I never once encountered a moment where I was forced to actually use any of duplicate machinery or items.

It’s disappointing that the game never really shifts into a faster gear, as the setup and execution elsewhere cry out for a more engaging game.

In the end, Hollywood Hospital 2 ends up prescribing too little pressure, too late.