If you're going to rip off a game, it's a good idea to make sure that you pick one that's both current and successful. So it's hard to understand what DR Studios was thinking when it decided to essentially remake the 1997 bomb Theme Hospital. The British developer's Hospital Tycoon is like a reheated version of Bullfrog's ancient hospital-management sim, which was actually a cheap copy of the company's Theme Park. Unsurprisingly, this copy of a copy of a copy is bland and derivative, with only a halfhearted attempt at establishing a Sims-style ambiance to make it stand apart from all the other shovelware out there with the word "tycoon" crammed somewhere into their titles.
Oddly enough, the biggest difference between Theme Hospital and Hospital Tycoon is that the latter has a more developed theme. Whereas the decade-old Bullfrog game was a straight god game, the story mode of play here drops you into a soap opera with all the angst and twice the cheese of a TV show like ER or the late, great St. Elsewhere. In addition to the usual tycoon-game management chores, you get to follow the escapades of heartthrob doc Rick Steele and the rest of the staff at Sapphire Beach Hospital. Everything here is certainly more fantasy than reality. The glass-walled hospital looks more like the famous Sydney Opera than the usual pile of bricks that passes for houses of healing in most metropolitan centers these days. Steele and a babe nurse are featured in posters all over examination rooms. And patients complain of kooky made-up diseases like "mummifried" and "lightbulbia." This is probably better than having to deal with budget cutbacks, fat nurses, and people staggering into emergency with flesh-eating disease or voluminous goiters, though everything is a little too kid-friendly here.
Minimum:
OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2 GHz Intel Dual Core Processor
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800/ATI Radeon HD 2600 (256MB minimum)
DirectX «: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Recommended:
OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Windows 7
Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Quad Core Processor
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX460/ATI Radeon HD 5850 (512MB minimum)
DirectX «: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible
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