War Hospital Review (Doom Spoon)
I recommend this game with a very big BUT. I've played the first chapter and that's 5 hours long, it was enjoyable. Here's a list of positives and negatives to consider:
This game is great but incredibly tedious.
Imagine playing Frostpunk but you're constantly juggling your workers around. It's frantic and very fun but having to move 3 engineers to the rest area only to have to move 2 nurses to the rest area and have to assign your medics back to their assigned posts only to have to re assign your nurses to their posts while assigning the new patients that just arrived to their surgeons all this in the span of 5 second intervals gets really old really quickly. The game isn't fast yet a "day" in game feels like you've played an hour. I get that it's a war hospital in WW1 but people are suffering from exhaustion after working for seemingly 2 hours. This game needs one of two things: More resilient staff or a larger workforce with better/automated schedules. In Frostpunk you set schedules and people work those schedules. Meanwhile in this game, your Surgeons can work an entire day while an engineer or a nurse or a medic need to be cycled non stop.
There's a leveling up system for your staff BUT you can only check their skills from the Personnel menu and you're never told how much experience they currently have (at least I didn't see it).
There's building BUT you're never going to have more than 700 materials meaning that the higher tier stuff isn't worth getting.
The game's quite buggy and has a few poorly thought out things. The triage center has a limit of 10 patients yet I've frequently gone over this number with no penalty.
The graveyard crew got stuck and never buried anyone after the 42nd death, I ended the scenario with 100 deaths. Nothing I did fixed this. And there was no negative event due to it (thank god).
The rehabilitation center has a limit of 10 patients, yet I've gone way over that number and again there's no issue.
Morale goes up and down and seems to do nothing.
You can randomly get patients that offer to join as staff yet if you don't have enough quarters you're set at a time limit to recruit them. This would be ok if your engineers weren't constantly crafting things or resting or if building materials were easy to come by in large numbers. Instead you have a random chance to get an immensely useful event, since getting new staff requires a very rare and limited resource, that can be completely wasted because you didn't build a very specific and expensive building that increases your staff slots.
I've stopped playing because I somewhat dread how hard the later chapters may be. And the constant staff management is very draining.
It's a good game. The devs need to tweak the numbers here and there and squash some very annoying bugs to make it fun. Get on a sale and definitely keep an eye on this game.