Video games often send us to neighboring galaxies, where we either fight aliens or help them. There are plenty of dialogues, shootouts, and spaceship flights in such games, but it is very rare to find out: how are things with medicine in extraterrestrial civilizations? In the view of the authors of Galacticare, everything there is about the same as here: dozens of offices, queues, slow doctors, and a multitude of diseases for which patients constantly seek help.
The Galaxy is in Danger
We become the director of the intergalactic medical company “Galacticare”, which provides services outside the solar system. Each mission sends us to a new planet, where there is no health care system, and sick aliens need to be treated. Artists will get sick before a music festival, farmers will have problems with the harvest for poor planets, or volcanic eruptions will occur at the place of pilgrimage of monks and everyone will get burns. The process always starts from scratch – we are given a small site where we can place everything we need, and then we are allowed to buy additional premises if the mission cannot be completed without it.
First, we place the reception desks, where newly arrived patients go immediately, and then the diagnostic room, where therapists issue referrals. In the introductory mission, many rooms are inaccessible: there is only a lab where skin diseases are treated, as well as a chiropractor, where fractures are treated. In the future, there will be many more rooms, and the next mission will begin with you placing them all one by one before opening the clinic – sooner or later, they will all be needed anyway. The construction process does not change: you create a room of the specified dimensions, put the necessary equipment in it and hire a doctor, whom you tie to the room.
But, as is usually the case in tycoons, offices alone are not enough. Both doctors and visitors will complain that the interiors are a bit shabby. Some have nowhere to sit while they wait for their turn, some will want to go to the toilet, some did not have a snack before visiting the clinic. So you install vending machines with food, hang posters and paintings, lay out rugs, select flower beds of different sizes, and so on – all so that red signs of discontent do not appear above the heads of visitors.
And since Galacticare is a game about aliens, representatives of different races have their own wishes and preferences. Tenki, which look like little monkeys, like well-kept offices and rooms with upgrades – for the sake of their good mood, it is advisable to buy upgrades. Visarges, which resemble octopuses, feel better in clinics, which not only have a lot of toilets, but also a lot of windows (before meeting these creatures, I never went into the windows menu). And funny cuber-balis, who walk on their hands and take objects with their feet, prefer spacious rooms – when creating offices, it is better to make them a little larger than the hint in the interface recommends.
How well patients feel in the clinic affects its rating. Having reached a certain number of stars, you will receive new decorations and cosmetic items as a gift. The rating is influenced by many things: the average health of patients after treatment, productivity, the number of deaths due to negligence or simply those who left unhappy, and so on. The game has a very detailed menu that shows each parameter in the form of graphs – it is easy to understand how good your doctors are, whether their levels and salaries need to be increased, whether toilets and food machines are distributed correctly.
Nice work
If you are not chasing grades, you do not need to monitor all this, because to complete the plot you just need to complete tasks. In most cases, they consist of a group of sick aliens coming to the clinic and you need to help them. By this point, the player usually has everything prepared: reception desks are located in different corners, offices of all types are arranged, entertainment and decorations are purchased. All that remains is to make the plot patients a priority so that they do not stand in lines and do not die before they are helped.
So Galacticare is not as hardcore as tycoons, where one expensive purchase can ruin everything, and ignoring a certain employee will lead to a chain of failures. Here you practically don’t need to worry about finances (there is always plenty of money), there are no flashing red icons above the heads of half the clients, no doctors tired from work and a floor littered with garbage. This is, one might say, a casual tycoon designed for a wide audience. Even if timers appear in missions, you always manage to do everything on time. And at other times, no one forces you to hurry – there is no desire to constantly pause the game, worrying that everything will fall apart while you hang posters behind the therapists’ tables.
Some fans of the genre may not like this, but this is what hooked me on the game. In the recent Two Point Campus , when another story mission was completed, I did not always want to continue playing on this map in sandbox mode – there were moments when I barely completed tasks with a couple of kopecks in my pocket and there was no point in doing anything further. Here, such a desire arose in each chapter, since there are a lot of resources, statistics are easy to study, and there is a lot of free space – arrange cheap offices, make everyone happy and earn your five stars.
At the same time, such simplicity leads to the fact that you pay minimal attention to some elements of the game. Take hiring doctors – it is assumed that you will study the questionnaires of candidates, each of whom has strengths and weaknesses. But in reality, this does not matter at all if you just want to complete story missions. The fact that someone makes diagnoses or treats four seconds longer than regular doctors does not really affect anything. At some point, an “achievement” popped up, informing me that I hired a psychopath – such a doctor raises his mood by killing patients. But I did not notice any changes in the gameplay at all.
Same goes for room upgrades. The efficiency regulator will increase the amount of money a room brings in, but there are no problems with finances here anyway. The infrasonic dampener increases the service life of the office, but you will rarely think about this parameter. The equipment monitor allows doctors to gain experience for working with clients faster, but the difference between a newly hired doctor and one who has already increased his level is barely noticeable. Again, I am talking only about completing story missions – if you set a goal to get the maximum rating, such details will matter.
But the process of building a clinic is exciting, especially when you unlock more and more opportunities with each new mission. You arrange rest rooms for the staff and buy more chairs so that there are enough for everyone. You place hospitals where you send seriously ill patients and restore their health a little so that they do not die before the examination. You build laboratories and classrooms so that doctors can work with blueprints and improve their skills. Everything is very calm, the controls are convenient even on a gamepad, all the necessary information can be quickly accessed, and resources flow like a river. Especially if you click on small insects flying around the clinic – they give money and other valuable currency.
Galacticare is largely entertaining because of its fun atmosphere and good humor in the vein of Theme Hospital and other Bullfrog games . The aliens themselves are funny, but there are plenty of other things to laugh about, from the fully voiced dialogue to the treatment methods. The bone-setter doesn’t just fix broken bones – the patient climbs into a large ball that gnaws on the broken bones, after which new ones are printed on a 3D printer. To treat space sickness, caused by high-speed flights, the patient is placed in a centrifuge where they are pounded with all their might – basically, a wedge is knocked out with a wedge. There are patients who suddenly realize that they are afraid of space. And some suffer from galacticism – their torso begins to resemble the starry sky.
What surprised me most was the almost complete absence of bugs. If there are any oddities, they don’t hinder progress – someone just refuses to go to rest, although the room is not that far away from him, or some other small thing happens. The interface periodically scared me with a red sign, meaning that a doctor is not assigned to a certain office. It turned out that the doctor simply went to get a drink and returned a few seconds later. In the Russian version, several lines are not translated, but this is nonsense – there is a lot of text here, and the translators did a great job of adapting numerous jokes and names of patients.
Galacticare is a funny and interesting tycoon, similar in spirit and gameplay to Bullfrog games . Fans of the genre should definitely try it, although the difficulty level will disappoint some – there is a feeling that it is impossible to make fatal mistakes here. But it is still enjoyable to play, and the casual audience, who just want to build clinics for their own pleasure, will spend more than one evening here.
Pros: unusual setting – building clinics for aliens and listening to their stories is fun; good humor; the number of possibilities increases with each level, and planning never gets boring; charming graphics; tycoon, accessible to all categories of players; excellent translation into Russian.
Cons: low difficulty level will not appeal to all fans of the genre; minor flaws, including a couple of untranslated dialogues.