Galacticare Review

Theme Hospital and its spiritual successor Two Point Hospital did a fine job of injecting a dose of humour into the hospital management sim, and, in that glorious tradition, Galacticare is cut from similar surgical cloth. You are the 'Director', the overseer of a big healthcare facility floating amid the stars, and, as such, it's your job to tend to the various ailments of afflicted aliens. Cue a colourful spectrum of extraterrestrial patients and their hilarious diseases (star warts, anyone?), and the bizarre medical machinery required to cure them. Interstellar illness has never been so enjoyable.

Orientation for your role as Director commences with a simple step-by-step tutorial from your omnipresent aide (and Galacticare executive robot), HEAL, as you learn how to place rooms using an intuitive drag and drop system, before decking them out with everything required to treat your patients. It's then a case of dealing with patients as they're deposited via shuttle (or train, in one particularly hectic level), starting with a visit to reception, then to diagnosis, and finally on to the specific treatments they require. Obviously, you'll need to hire doctors (who have great names like Megaman Pork, Excited Cheese, Zigvax Jackson XXXI, and Basil Coconut), assign them to rooms, train them, and give them a nice lounge where they can rest and recharge.

As with any management game, there are various needs to be taken care of, signified by little bubbles floating above the heads of doctors and patients alike, so if there's a lack of seating, too few decorations adorning your hospital, your waiting times are too long, or a doctor wants more money, you'll know about it. Happily, Galacticare has a nice clean UI, enabling you to access handy panels with the d-pad, so you can quickly scroll through rooms, props, doctors, your inventory, objectives, and any current issues your healthcare concern might have that are in need of immediate resolution, with ease.

You'll also be hassled with phone calls from the Galacticare higher-ups, as well as rivals (like Salazar, who sounds uncannily like Matt Berry), and clients checking in on your progress, as they drop special cases into your lap. Often, you'll be inundated with busloads of patients cursed with exotic afflictions like energy drink addiction, hypersleep crust, jellification, space fright, and hyperfreeze, prompting you to spring into action and ensure you have all the medical hardware and expertise on hand. From a basic skin lab to a 'boning chamber' (tee hee), your treatments only become more and more outlandish, extending to the 'dreamarium,' which includes a tentacular alien able to cure any psychological issue; a centrifuge that “spins the patient really, really fast but in a medical way”; and the so-called 'projectile medicine' room, containing a manned cannon that blasts its stricken victims with a flaming jet of pure expectorant.

Spanning a campaign of eleven chapters, each offering you a blank(ish) canvas to establish a new medical facility, ideally outfitted for any possible eventuality or unforeseen outbreak, Galacticare is never anything less than a joy. It's one of the most accessible and purely enjoyable management sims I've played in some time, laced with an easy sense of humour that's infectious. Once you've set up your hospital, a lot of it runs fairly autonomously, and when something does demand your attention, HEAL will pipe up to tell you. Things can occasionally get a little stressful, but it always feels like you're in control.

Shortcuts enable you to quickly focus in on whatever's going wrong, be it a shower of meteors raining down on your rooms and damaging equipment, patients waiting too long as their life force ebbs away, or an influx of different aliens species all with a cornucopia of horribly funny illnesses. Plucky Medibots will carry out maintenance and repairs, while cleaning up puddles of vomit and other slimy bodily fluids (behave), although you can deal with infestations of voracious alien bugs yourself, clicking on the skittering critters to squish them. This may feel like a slightly more casual management experience at times, but there's no shortage of depth here, whether it's conducting research to increase the efficiency of doctors in diagnosing and treating diseases or ensuring your staff are happy.

Each alien species also has their own unique desires to take into consideration, so plonking decorations and treatment rooms willy-nilly won't cut it – some need wide corridors, others need 'curious' decorations, or plenty of windows to stare through. Fulfilling all of these various needs and successfully taking care of the myriad maladies thrown your way is the only chance you have at achieving an elusive 5-star hospital rating. The thing is, Galacticare is never not fun, even if hardened management sim veterans might find it to be relatively lightweight and slightly lacking in nitty-gritty granular numbers and details. Fans of spreadsheets and line graphs might feel shortchanged.

For anyone else craving a breezy hospital management sim with a healthy sense of humour, however, Galacticare is exactly what we'd prescribe.