Over my spring break week I had the chance to check out the latest DLC for my favorite silly hospital management sim Two Point Hospital. The surprise "Speedy Recovery" DLC offered players three new hospitals and a fleet of goofy ambulances to manage. All the DLC for Two Point have been relatively cheap--about $8 if you purchase it early and that price tag is appropriate.
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| My fleet of ambulances. |
What's new in the DLC?
The main feature of "Speedy Recovery" is the addition of a new map with special "emergency" events that periodically pop up. Each hospital features a plot of land that serves as your ambulance bay and that can serve multiple parked ambulance types. Once you've purchased an ambulance you can deploy it to the site of an emergency to retrieve patients and return them to the hospital for treatment. In order to operate ambulances you need to have staff trained in driving--these staff (nurses and doctors can both be trained in driving and eventually flying when you reach the second hospital) will stop what they are doing, run to the ambulance you deployed and then be unavailable while they are retrieving the patients.
During the ambulance ride patients will be partially diagnosed (and diagnosis level depends on the type of ambulance you deploy) and can skip the trip to the GP's office when they arrive. Instead, they will head directly for various diagnosis rooms, so you can expect your general diagnosis, cardiograms, and other diagnosis rooms to stay fairly busy when ambulances return. Basically, you need to make sure that you have enough staff to operate ambulances and also keep the diagnosis rooms manned. I found that I needed to hire more staff than in previous hospitals--and more staff means more monthly expenses.
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| The Airloovator and Big Healer wait for deployment. |
The highlight of the DLC is the variety of ambulances available for purchase. At first you can only purchase ground ambulances that travel on the roads, but once you get to the second hospital flying ambulances are unlocked. The ambulances range from a giant, speedy monster truck to a slow, floating giant duck. Smaller ambulances tend to be fast, offer poor diagnosis, and have a limited capacity (only carrying 1-2 patients). Larger ambulances offer the opposite--slow travel times but better diagnosis and higher capacity (the flying duck ambulance can carry up to 8 passengers and the Pantmobile--a clown car--can carry up to 12).
Part of the challenge in the DLC is strategizing how to best use your ambulances--certain emergencies only have a few patients, so it's a race to get to them before your competitors do. Patients will expire over time, so it's important to get to them as quickly as you can. There's also the matter of ambulance maintenance--your ambulances suffer wear and tear and must be repaired. A new staff member--a genius mechanic named Gretchen Gearbox joins the staff at each hospital and will repair your ambulances. You can also train janitors in the new mechanic skill, which is generally a good idea because like other staff, Gretchen also needs to take breaks (and those breaks can coincide with times when you want to deploy an ambulance and it needs to be repaired).
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| Treating a patient with Under the Weather. |
Like previous DLC's there are also a few new diseases to manage--patients presenting with Under the Weather are dressed in rain proof attire and are accompanied by a tiny storm cloud that periodically rains...leaving small puddles anywhere those patients travel to (meaning that your janitors will be busy mopping up). The other new visible disease, Hive Mind, presents as patients who have a beehive stuck on their heads and honey dripping onto their clothing. Patients with Snowed In present once you've reached the final map in the snowy reaches of Two Point County--they resemble giant, walking snowmen and must be treated in their own treatment room. One of the interesting decisions with these three new diseases is the fact that you can build more than one treatment machine in the room. Unfortunately, each machine requires a doctor to operate it, so you have to up the number of staff who can work in the room and it can also add to the staffing burdens. There are also several other new visible diseases that utilize traditional treatment rooms (like the pharmacy and psychology office).
Each new hospital presents different challenges at each star level--most of them revolve around utilizing your fleet of ambulances. I found the most difficult challenge to be maintaining top emergency reputation for three months straight--doing so requires making sure that your ambulances are constantly being deployed and that you're able to successfully treat the patients who arrive. It's easy to fall behind or dispatch an ambulance that arrives too late to an emergency and comes back empty. The first two hospitals also feature a steady flow of regular (non-emergency) patients who still need to visit a GP's office and go through the same normal treatment pattern. The final hospital relies strictly on emergency patients and it's very important to make sure you're maintaining a steady flow of incoming patients or your finances can go downhill very quickly.
The one negative point worth mentioning is that the DLC is currently slightly buggy. Most of the bugs involve ambulances and staff getting stuck. I had to restart one map several times because of this bug. Hopefully future patches will address this problem.
Recommendation:
I love Two Point Hospital and will happily play any DLC they release. It was surprising that they released more DLC when the new Two Point Campus is coming out in May. I found the addition of ambulances to add another layer to the management aspect and to be somewhat challenging (mostly maintaining reputation for three straight months). I didn't feel that the DLC added anything earth shattering, but it was a chance to relax and play more Two Point, so I'll take it. If you enjoyed the base game and just want another chance to try out some new hospitals, it's the perfect opportunity.
