Generation XX
When game genre mashups teach you how to play.
Recently, I had to have a small surgical procedure. I queued at reception, sat on a bench, got admitted to a ward, chatted with a nurse (who totally had the Bedside Manner spec) and had my fluid analysed. The guy with the scalpel removed a rubber duck and I was discharged with a pleasant sounding ping. A cure icon and several thousand dollar payment floated peacefully above my head. Thank goodness this took place in a hospital someone else was running. It’s rare anyone emerges from my Two Point Hospital’s surgery alive, let alone cured.
Why? Turns out that I’ve been playing this game very badly, despite clumsily forcing three stars across the base game. It hasn’t helped that I’ve engaged with the expansion packs in a bemused and inconsistent fashion. The Topless Mountain level of Pebberley Island flummoxed me so thoroughly that I had to ask Two Point Expert, Jemma (gamertag: urbanneurosis), for help. I like tower defence and I like Two Point Hospital. Do I like them together? I certainly like how much I’ve learned from this unlikely combination, but I’m not sure I’m having fun, as yet.
Jemma says, “Topless Mountain is brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting. Say goodbye to happy staff and high reputation.” She warns she spent up to 100 hours attempting it around 50 times before finally surviving 42 waves for the final achievement. The premise is that ever-larger contingents of patients arrive, like a megaemergency, but where all 85 of them are suddenly queuing at reception and every diagnosis room thereafter. If you can’t process them very quickly, you’re paying staff (at the beginning, or end, of the process) to stand around.
I started training doctors during their ‘treatment lull’, which is how I discovered there’s a Diagnosis III?! In fact, there’s a Diagnosis V. I had never recruited someone with greater than Diagnosis II, and so had assumed higher tiers of this spec didn’t exist. Who has time for min-maxing during the relentlessness of a regular level? I loved that I now had the time to try. As Jemma notes, “Wait until you find out what else goes to level V.” But, staff with five specs are expensive. I failed at waves 15-20 several times, entirely no longer able to break even.
The level incentivises ‘being good’. If you can maintain a streak of 10 cures in a row, you are rewarded with a 50% boost to all income. I upgraded machines and crunched Treatment (which, amazingly, also goes to V) and achieved this (probably) twice, momentarily, in 15 hours of play. Jemma (having scrutinised screenshots) also attributes my continued failure to a too-high diagnosis threshold, “stragglers” and their want to use my (superfluous) cafe. Reading between the lines, she wants me to ‘be evil’; jack up the prices, send the hopeless home.
I was surprised that Two Point Hospital became ‘tower defense’ in the Pebberley expansion. I think, as with most ‘real-time strategy/management’ games, what I really want is to play in a way that is perfect, all of the time. Now that I know my surgeon can specialise all the way to tier V, I’m desperate to try this. The lack of pressure, and more time for training, on Topless Mountain was only an illusion, thanks to the generous starting budget. I’m going to return to the early surgery levels and work on training. Can patients survive the removal of their rubber duck? Maybe they can.