Author
Cody Sharp
Price: $1.99
Publisher: Zed Worldwide
The truth about Hollywood is that it’s made up of folks just like you or me but every once in a while they come into a hospital having turned into a Gorgon. A normal hospital may not be able to handle something like this but a Hollywood Hospital is ready and waiting. Your job, if you are able to stomach it, is save these movie stars from themselves.
The actual gameplay of Hollywood Hospital is repetitious, increasingly fast paced and yet at times, fun. When a star walks in to your clinic, you need them to go see the receptionist, then find them a doctor, then go get an x-ray (or visit some other type of machine), then fix their ailment using a mini-game (depends on what type of sickness they have), send them to bed rest and then back to the receptionist to pay their bill. Rinse and repeat. There are some different strategies and ways to be more efficient but basically this game comes down to quick tsps of the screen and being able to do a lot of repetition without tiring.
As mentioned, each ailment has a different mini game that correspondingly treats the diseases. For the Gorgon, you have to snip the snakes of her head as quickly as possible, for a person who is overly anxious, you slap the hell out of them as quickly as possible. Upon completing 5 levels, you move onto a new stage. There are quite a few levels and stages within the game. Each stage makes the hospital larger, requiring you to move quicker and make sure your stars don’t leave unhappy (they have a hissy fit if they wait to long to be helped). To help you accomplish moving people through the necessary steps, you use the money you have earned from previous levels and stages to buy new upgrades to your facility including new doctors, machines, etc. One annoyance is that after you have fully upgraded your entire facility and go onto the next stage, you start back on square one. What the heck? Couldn’t I at least sell off all of the improvements I made so I could take that money into the new stage to buy equipment and staff?
The end result is a game that is on the brink of being fun. The levels and accolades you pick up are many and the different ailments the stars come in with are fun (the first few times you see them). However, after a while the whole thing feels pretty repetitive and doesn’t exactly make you clamor for the next stage. If you’re a fan of games where you have to gather every last bit of efficiency out of a process (maybe you’re an efficiency consultant), then this game isn’t half bad. The graphics, music and gameplay are nothing special but the setting is unique and interesting enough that it may be worth taking a look.
Overall Value for it’s $1.99 price point
Overall Value: 2.5 out of 5.0 stars Graphics: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars Sound: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars Controls: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars