Animal Hospital Review (PS5)

Nacon is best known for their PC and console accessories such as controllers, headsets, gaming chairs or cables. Yet lately their name pops up more and more related to games called mediocre at best such as The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Ad Infinitum. Among these releases, we find other games that make us question even more if we can take Nacon seriously as a publisher, games such as Animal Hospital.

Developed by Tivola Games, Animal Hospital is the console version of a mobile game, that bears all the burdens of a production built on a freemium model. And while it can be enjoyable for those young adults, looking to kill some time with nurturing back to health sick animals, it is not a game that manages to rise to the challenge of bigger screen productions.

Don’t get me wrong, after playing Gollum or Ad Infinitum we can see a pattern where originality or quality does not seem to be primary concern for the publisher, Animal Hospital is aiming even lower. It is a mobile game that had its microtransactions neutered, but that suffered no other improvement. It still feels like and plays like a game you would fire up while waiting for the bus or while waiting for the check after a not so pleasant meal.

Unlike the other examples published by Nacon, Animal Hospital lacks even the basic gameplay elements or evolution that we are used to seeing in console of PC games. It is an unaltered mobile game with very simplistic and infinitely repetitive mechanisms devised to make time run faster and not to entertain and repay you for investing time in sitting in front of the screen. The premises being different, the result couldn’t be different either.

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You start as in most mobile career/management games inheriting a property, this time a veterinary clinic, from a mysterious benefactor. While going through hordes of sick animals, your main purpose is to A) revive and redecorate the somewhat decrepit property to your taste and B) find out who is behind your unexpected good luck. If this sounds familiar, it means that you played one or a few mobile games built on the exact same premise.

In your quest you will be joined by a few meaningless characters, that will serve as advisors and even helpers along your journey. But in Animal Hospital they are nothing less than voiceless faces during cutscenes, since they never actually show up in the game world. You cannot interact with any of them beyond the badly scripted dialogues used as cut scenes by the developers.

Except the animals themselves, the only things you will be able to interact with are the rooms you can restore and upgrade, and various spots around your clinic where you can place various decorative items. And the variety of items is as limited as the gameplay itself, once again confirming the unescapable nudge that you are playing a budget mobile game on your TV screen.

It’s not just that the thematic holiday items for Halloween and Easter have been tossed together carelessly, most of the big decorative items are actually individual parts of the themes that you can chose as room upgrades. So, the developers could not be bothered to create a larger variety of assets, instead they recycled as much as they could.

The lack of any other holiday themed object leads us to believe, that the mobile game was such a success that it only warranted live ops investment for 2 major holiday events, but no Xmas, or that the developers again could not have been bothered to include more or to incorporate them in any meaningful way with the story. Either way the conclusion leads to a shameless money grab attempt without any finesse or respect for the customer.

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The same goes for the repetitive gameplay that is structured as a mobile game: split into days and limiting what you can do each day. Though microtransactions are not present anymore, the simplistic actions and the high number of uninspired medical resources needed to treat animals remain.

As a result the unchallenging treatment scenario plays out the same way each time: hurt animal comes in with an already pre-established diagnostic, you treat them through less than basic minigames, the animals recover you cash in and you invest your coins in making the clinic prettier and able to generate more cash.

The difference compared to other games is the lack of attention to details: when animals get better you don’t see this, beyond the results on the chart – they still leave with their mucus hanging down their noses or as beat up as they came in. There is no real challenge to the game even after adding additional treatments – it all had to be kept simple not to risk losing the mobile gamers wanting to kill time and not engage in slightly complex game mechanics.

The same shortcomings apply to the visual part of the game as well, it was adopted roughly to the big screen, bit only as to fir the margins. The various windows overlap the face of the animals, the Band-Aid is not fitting very well rather floating as a parallel plane to the body it was applied on, the whole perspective is a bit off and the list could continue. It is everything that you don’t mind playing on a phone or tablet screen, but it becomes annoying on a TV or monitor.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion