Galacticare Review (Space is the Place)
I really wanted to love this game, it started good, sadly, the number of bugs and clearly untested systems makes it impossible to enjoy past certain point.
When scumbags at EA bought Bullfrog an entire sub-genre of management sims died out, and it has taken over 20 years for succesors to decide to continue that style... sadly, the original Bullfrog team also returned, so anyone trying to emulate or supass them it´s gonna have a hard time after Two Point Hospital was launch. Galacticare gets close, it does some things really good, like a more strong and interesting story, better humor and a good use of the galactic theme and settings. But everything else...
Galacticare it´s extremelly easy if you only care for completing maps, a lot of them you could finish them on a 2 hour session without even trying. But achieving 5 star rating on some hospitals become impossible as the math simply won´t favor you, you won´t have enough patients on the hospital to achieve the performance numbers asked, or the economical output you are requiere to get, in some maps I had to cheat the system like putting 5 teleporters that bring more patients completely breaking the map but for one second because you have so many and if you threatment fast you will achieve those numbers, or firing every single doctor just as you are about to finish one cycle so you don´t pay salaries and you can earn the money asked... and the maps where the math is correct, still, you are just gonna leave the game play itself for a few hours while your doctors level up and the numbers go up.
And all this, you NEED to do it on your first go, why? Because the game doesn´t seem to have coding preventing from future ilness to appear on older maps. So say you play map 1, complete it on 4 stars, then play until map 4 and decide to comeback to map 1 for that 5th star... you can´t. The game will star launching you every new ilness you discovered on maps 2, 3 and 4, and ask you to build the rooms requiere for those threatments while not deleting the older threatment rooms, which can´t be done because all maps have the exact limited space for the requiered rooms for the quests of each map.
But this isn´t even the biggest problem, the biggest problem is PC performance. The game lags and freezes all the time, GPU usage goes over the roof. At least once per day the game just freezes on me and I have to alt-tab out and force closing the app.
If you are the type of players that buys games, plays 2 maps and then leaves a 2 sentence positive review, this game may be perfect for you. But if you have passion for this genre, were intrigued by the theme and presentation, either wait for updates or just go for another title, this one needs ironing and I´m unsure those issues are gonna be adress, seeing as devs are already focusing on the challenge mode (basically replay the older levels on a higher difficulty, since how easy the game is was a big complain when it launched, but if you check the achievement ratios you can see how little anyone actually cared for that) or talking about adding new content, when it´s clear first fixxing the content already here should be priority one. On map 6 you will only deal with one alien race but still you are requiere to work the preferences of all other species. On map 8 the voice acting just repeats, an audio will star and a few seconds later it will star again, for every single conversation on that map... the more you play, the more bugs appear map by map.
A real shame overall because like I said, the story is really good, the writting of the game in general and specially for this genre really stands out for it´s quality. And the theme it´s so well taking advance of. But again, untested systems, bad mathematical calculation for the 5th star on some maps, and a collection of performance issues and bugs turn an initially interesting and promising experience, into dreadfull grind for completionist or, judging by achievements ratios, just forgoet about the game and move on onto greener pastures.