Are We There Yeti?

After fully realizing my pirate-y bloodlust in Assassin's Creed 4:  Black Flag, I decided it was time for a break from all the stabbing and shooting.  Luckily a brand new DLC for one of my favorite games from this year rolled out at just about the perfect time!  The Bigfoot DLC for Two Point Hospital offers even more whacky hospital management.  If you haven't gotten your fill of curing weird diseases and playing task manager, well, this is your chance to re-enter the fray.

Two of the three new hospitals in the Bigfoot DLC.

The Bigfoot DLC offers up three brand new hospitals located in on the snowy northern half of the Two Point county map.  Each hospital offers up unique challenges that include a few new diseases to cure combined with a theme.  The first hospital, Underlook, is situated near a hotel/ski resort that is looking to add hospital services for its accident prone guests.  This hospital reminds me of the nightmare that was Duckworth-Upon-Bilge, but it's more like a Duckworth-lite--you only get paid for achieving the random goals that the hotel periodically throws out and these can vary from promoting a certain number of staff or curing patients in a specific treatment room.  Like on the Duckworth level, you have to pay attention to your cash flow and make sure you aren't hiring too many staff or overspending.  The level is further complicated by a reputation mechanic--guests can review the hotel (and those reviews can be either positive or negative) and it will have an impact on your reputation.  Your reputation starts out at a pitifully low level and the scenario requires you to raise it much higher.  Luckily, marketing campaigns are very useful for raising your reputation and cancelling a few undesirable hotel requests won't damage your rep too much.  One of the more unique aspects of this level is that the hotel helps to cover your costs based on your cure rate.  This factor makes this level much easier than Duckworth.

The K-9 Away is used to treat patients with Barking Mad.

The next map on the DLC is Swelbard.  Swelbard is an abandoned research facility and requires you to start with a ruined building full of garbage that needs to be cleaned up.  The major challenge on Swelbard is that all your staff are completely untrained.  Every staff member you hire requires training, so hiring enough staff so that your rooms are covered while training occurs is a major balancing act.  At Swelbard a new disease crops up, Barking Mad, which turns patients into dogs (it looks like a human in a dog costume).  To cure this new disease you must build a K-9 Away treatment room that looks like a giant dog house.  A few other diseases with visuals also start popping up (diseases that can be treated in the treatment rooms you've already unlocked)--there's Eye Candy which has patients with giant lollipops over their eyes; Tartan Telomeres which presents as patients with plaid patterns on their faces; Bard Flu which populates your hospital with Shakespeare look-alikes who require some psychiatric treatment; Evergreen presents by coloring patients faces green with some nice leafy branches.  Partway through the level you will see patients dressed like giant Godzilla-like creatures or robots traipsing through your hospital.  The new disease Urban Metropolism presents in two ways and requires patients to storm through a miniature city, wrecking it and then getting cured by some mysterious laser attachment.  Curing all these diseases and hitting research related goals (training staff in the research skill...which always feels like a waste) leads you to victory.

The Reanimator freezes, then reanimates patients with Monster Mishmash.

The last map in the DLC was the one that I found had the most unique twist--Roquefort Castle throws some real doozies at you.  The castle is haunted, this means that bunches of ghosts (5-10) randomly pop-up throughout the hospital.  Your janitorial staff has to be on their toes because capturing all those ghosts is time consuming and requires cleaning up the ectoplasm that they leave behind.  The map itself also presents some challenges--the castle offers plenty of space, but it's made up of very long corridors that don't directly connect to each other.  Everything is very spread out and ghosts can pop-up in any part of the hospital.  The castle is also prone to several natural disasters--avalanches and hailstorms--which will have your janitors scrambling even more!  Avalanches will damage your machinery and cause trashed pieces of the building to fall onto the floor and hailstorms will deposit large chunks of ice (similar to lava, but without the burning) that could damage machinery.  I would classify this level as one of the "janitorial nightmare" levels.  A new disease, Monster Mishmash, is also introduced and requires a special treatment room in the form of the Reanimator.  The most challenging part of Roquefort is the janitorial aspect--it was very common to have a rash of ghosts followed by an avalanche or hailstorm.  This situation would leave your machinery damaged, your hospital littered with unsightly garbage, and a bunch of ghosts scaring patients and leaving blobs of ectoplasm everywhere.  Then throw in the way that the map is spread out for some real craziness.

One thing I noticed about all three hospitals in the DLC was that they seemed to throw quite a few diseases requiring treatment rooms at you.  You really need to hire more staff to cover those rooms and it complicates things even further.

Treating Urban Metropolism means letting patients smash a miniature city.

So, the big question remains, should you buy this DLC?  If you enjoyed the base game I would definitely recommend it.  The DLC offers the chance to play a few more hospitals and cure some clever diseases (Bard Flu is my favorite).  It sells for only $8.99 and will add about 20 more hours of hospital managing fun (if you're shooting for the illustrious 3-star level).  Sadly, there is no bigfoot disease (but there is a yeti who will visit your hospital and inspect it).

What's new in this DLC:
--several new visual diseases to cure
--three diseases with unique treatment rooms
--new items (some are Christmas themed) to spruce up your hospital
--three new hospitals with unique scenarios
--new research projects (this may have been added in an update prior to the DLC)