War Hospital review: Bitter medicine in an unwinnable conflict

You’re assigned to supervise a desperately overstretched British military hospital near the front, dealing with waves of wounded, an acute shortage of supplies and an exhausted team of surgical staff. You never have enough of anything – time, energy, people, medicine – and must learn to prioritise the injured soldiers with the best chance of survival.

There’s no point in wasting precious resources on the near-dead when treatment could be better used to save one or more their comrades. Thus begins War Hospital’s cruel cycle of triage and surgery, hoping against hope that your team can clear the decks of those potential survivors before the next batch of wailing ambulances brings more casualties.

Of course, Polish studio Brave Lamb doesn’t shirk from piling on more pressure with randomised events such as German attacks on the hospital itself. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse.

Amid all this despair, the methodical and cathartic healing of patients provides the backbone of the game – assessing the intake of wounded, assigning surgeons to perform life-saving operations and shunting the patients quickly to recovery wards.

Though primarily a top-down sim, the game lets you zoom into each building to watch your staff at work – cleaning, binding, cutting and sewing or just ushering patients from stage to stage of their treatment. The staff themselves need care, requiring food, rest and comfortable accommodation – plus a little booze if you can source it. Naturally, there’s never enough of all their requirements to go around either.

It sounds depressing in theory– and it is in practice too, though you will take solace from keeping just ahead of the bad odds and saving more people than you expected on any given day. The kicker is that once you’ve restored a soldier’s health, you then face the tricky decision of whether to send him back to the front or home to his family. It might seem an easy choice but too many of the latter starves the army of numbers, leading to even fiercer assaults from the Germans. And that means, you guessed it, more casualties.

You could compare War Hospital to the no-win scenarios of similar survival sims such as Frostpunk. The juggling act rarely gives you room to breathe and most of your experiences will end in failure. Where War Hospital suffers most in comparison to Frostpunk is the relatively unpolished finish and lack of depth. The triage and treatment fall back on repetition too often while the soldiers’ back stories don’t convey sufficient emotional punch.

All that said, it captures the futility of war in its endless cycles and the overwhelming feeling that you won’t be able to save everyone who crosses your operating table.