Military Hospital Review – Untapped Potential

While war themes often appear in games, they tend to be limited to first-person shooters and games set in World War II. A game set in World War I is a relative rarity in itself, but when you add in the fact that it’s a strategy game and we see the war from a doctor’s perspective, it’s quite unique. The game in question is War Hospital from Brave Lamb, which has been in development for quite some time and, after various delays, finally launched last week.

The title takes place at the very end of the war that people then knew only as “The Great”. We find ourselves in 1918 on the Western Front, but instead of being a soldier in the trenches, we take on the role of British doctor Henry Wells, who runs a nearby field hospital. It is there that we will live out the last months of the war and try to cure as many people as possible.

• Platform: PC (tested version), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
• Release date: 11.01.2024
• Developer: Studio “Brave Lamb”
• Publisher: After that
• Genre: Strategy, manager
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Data for download: 6 GB
• Play time: ~20 hours
• Price: 29.99 EUR (Steam)

Played on the following PC build:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K
• FRAME: 32GB DDR5 6000MT/s
• Video card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB VRAM)
• Storage: Solidigm P44 Pro (1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD)

War from a doctor’s point of view

If there is one thing I can praise about War Hospital, it is definitely the setting and the incredibly strong atmosphere. Every time I turned on the game, I really felt like I was transported back more than 100 years, where medical supplies and tools were not as advanced, capacity was severely limited, and raw materials and workers were in short supply. It is not up to you to save everyone. Some patients may die during a botched operation, others may not make it in time at all, and you will be forced to, albeit with great displeasure, abandon them. However, the game constantly reminds you of the dead, as their numbers can be seen at the top of the user interface, and their names are also written on a monument.

From the very beginning, the game can also be linked to certain personal stories. While the units of soldiers are in the waiting room, you can read their biographies, such as what they experienced as children, whether they have families, or how they got to the front. However, it soon gets to the point where patients are facing off against doctors and simply trying to save as many people as possible. This is certainly not the game’s fault, because I’m sure that’s how it looked back then. Although each soldier had his own, undoubtedly extremely interesting, personal story, at that time no one cared about it at all, because he was just one of thousands passing through the hospital.

The order sounded clear, but was it correct?

However, you will have to face certain decisions. During the game, you will also encounter VIP patients. Whether they are soldiers who have been interceded for by one of the commanders, specialized civilians who could help you in the hospital, but also prisoners of war, who after treatment will be sent back to interrogation and torture. It is up to you whether you give priority to VIP patients and whether you really, for example, send prisoners back to their suffering or let them die the way they want. For rehabilitated patients, you can also decide whether to send them directly to the front, to the headquarters or release them from service.

Closely related to this is the second very strong aspect of the game. Like in Frostpunk (which is very close to War Hospital in some ways), you have explorers at your disposal who can reach nearby villages and other places where various events await you. You will have to deal with evacuating villagers, family problems, and also a lot of clashes with enemy units. Again, how you approach this is up to you. Will you follow orders or let your head and heart guide you? Will you act according to custom and law, even if it may harm you, or will you make a profitable but highly unethical decision? These are all the things I liked most about War Hospital.

Stressful experience

We have discussed the “moral” side, but we should probably take a closer look at the gameplay. As the director of the hospital, you will take care of its proper functioning. As such, you will have to provide the necessary raw materials. Some of them will be provided to you by the headquarters, but many of them you will have to make yourself. In addition, you will have to take care of patients, who may have various injuries (physical, psychological or chemical) and therefore need to be treated by the appropriate doctor. If the operation is successful, they will be taken care of in a rehabilitation center, if they die, they must be buried. And, of course, you will have to take care of your staff: doctors, nurses, engineers or teams transporting patients between buildings.

The mechanics are easy to understand, but it certainly won’t be easy. There will be more wounded soldiers, and you will also have to worry about your immediate safety: the nearest trenches are not far from the hospital, and if they are breached, you will lose your mind. At the same time, you are dealing with the morale of the people and taking care of upgrading the hospital so that you have more staff or perhaps a better chance of success for the operation. But it is important to emphasize (and this is where the game differs most from Frostpunk) that this is not a construction strategy, but rather a manager. You will not be constructing any buildings here, you will only be upgrading them, researching new medical methods and managing the staff, who may otherwise collapse from extreme fatigue.

Serious problems

This makes the game very tense because of everything you have to pay attention to. I wouldn’t take this as a fault, on the contrary, you have to be under pressure in the Military Hospital. But the problem is that the difficulty is very unbalanced. Here too, of course, you can argue that this is just real healing, but in this case, in my opinion, it is quite harmful. Although at times you are at peace, there are moments when so much falls on you that you simply cannot cope with it, and you just watch in disbelief as one person after another dies, and your fighting spirit drops. Especially when in the second chapter you have to deal with the Spanish flu. And as soon as you screw something up (for example, you run out of the basic raw materials from which everything is made), you get into a “death spiral” from which it is very difficult to get out.

The second problem is that the game is quite monotonous. Basically, all the mechanics are presented to you from the very beginning, and (aside from the already mentioned improvements) War Hospital does not offer anything special. You will go through three chapters one after another, but they are all very similar, the only difference is the events during exploration, otherwise your task is always to survive a certain amount of time. And you continue to watch the same videos from the trenches. In principle, the most unique is the second chapter, where you will find the already mentioned Spanish flu, but it requires significantly more specialization. This is really not much for a game that will take you almost 20 hours.

Bugs, where are you looking?

But the worst thing is the technical side, which, unfortunately, is simply catastrophic. During the game I encountered countless errors. Almost constant loss of sound and various visual glitches in the form of screen flickering or what should have been on the screen was not displayed.

These may be “minor” issues, but add to them the bugs that directly affect the gameplay. It happened to me several times that the train that was supposed to bring raw materials simply did not arrive without any explanation. Several times I encountered a bug where I could not click on anything and had to go back to the menu and load a previous save (manually, by the way, because the game does not autosave). I still had to fix the bug at the end of the second chapter, when the cutscene refused to play.

Some tasks were completed before I had time to do what was required of me, or, on the contrary, new ones (and exactly the same) popped up, although I had not completed the previous one. In the very first chapter, it happened to me that I sent my probably best nurse on a task for which I was supposed to receive a solid reward. But the end of the task was only after the end of the first chapter, and the game did not think about this. Starting from the second chapter, the nurse was taken away from the hospital, and I never returned her.

This is a serious case, doctor.

The list of bugs is endless, and it’s beyond me how the game could have even been released in such a state. Either there was a serious lack of testing, or the publisher was simply pushing the release. Or maybe not enough budget? Because the overall presentation of the game also suffers a bit. While the soundtrack is great and definitely adds to the atmosphere, the graphics are pretty average, and I don’t really like the stylization chosen. This is especially noticeable in the aforementioned movies, of which there are also damn few.

Military Hospital is a very tough case for me. It’s a game with an absolutely brilliant idea and very realistic handling, which is also its biggest weakness. The repetition and the huge number of all sorts of bugs throw it off. And although, despite all this, I liked the game, I can’t give it a rating higher than average. For now, I would recommend waiting a few weeks or maybe even months. If a patch fixes most of the bugs, the title will surely please at least fans of the genre and the theme of the First World War. Until then, unless you really want it, I would rather avoid it.