On paper, the aim of Galacticare seems straightforward: grow your chain of hospitals by taking on bigger and bigger challenges – ranging from space-trains to music festivals, to an entire planet – while juggling patients, pests, natural disasters, and a rival chain. But any expectations of Galacticare being a staid or overly-serious game can be thrown out from entering the tutorial, where HEAL, your AI assistant, introduces you to the Objectives panel by stating that “Your Objectives should be displayed now. If they’re not, then everything is broken, and it may be simpler for you to resign”.
HEAL’s sarcastic wit is not the only source of humour – in fact, every member of the cast provides humour both by themselves and in the way they play off other characters. Robot-janitor Medi’s character springs fully-formed from his first line: “It’s me, Medi! HEAL says I’m a toaster, and that I might actually be useful if I was dropped in someone’s bathtub”. Medi’s eager kid-sidekick nature is sympathetic on its own but then becomes comedic as a foil to HEAL; the pair bicker like a robotic equivalent of JD and Dr Cox from Scrubs.
CEO and gadget-creator Kora is the comparative voice of reason, but she is still fleshed out with a streak of mad-scientist enthusiasm for the unknown and a tendency to briefly lose rationality when talking to (or about) the adorable engineer species, the Tenki. In her defence, the Tenki are very fuzzy. Finally, antagonist Salazar’s blend of slick CEO charm with contempt for the player’s hospital-running skills, such as the player’s decision to actually pay their staff, makes him an enjoyable villain both to listen to and to win against.
Galacticare‘s writing is full of humour in many forms, from sharp wit to surreal non-sequiturs –“It began with crop circles and cow abductions, and ended up in appropriating the most problematic parts of 1950s Earth culture – surf rock and traditional gender roles”. Cultural references also play their part – a recurring patient named Klem Banzig frequently needs rehab from his energy drink addiction, while another introduces themselves as Xirleslienielssennoria but then says “and you may call me Shirley“.
The jokes are all supported by excellent and character-filled voice-acting. While the other audio components are all completely fine and fitting for the setting, especially the squelches and crunches of treatment sound effects, the voice acting is definitely the auditory highlight. However, the audio also contained the only bug I found annoying; in some levels, HEAL’s dialogue would play twice or overlap another character’s dialogue if I triggered it while HEAL was speaking. Aside from this and the other recurrent minor bug of the camera briefly throwing itself to the side when cancelling a dialogue box, the game mostly behaves well on a Series X: I’ve experienced a crash-to-desktop twice in my 40 hours of play.
In terms of gameplay, many of the overall ideas are familiar but appropriately re-worked for the sci-fi setting and made into a cohesive set of abilities. All cleaning and maintenance is taken care of by robots rather than human janitors, rooms can be upgraded with “nanites” that prevent the doctor inside from experiencing hunger or losing energy, and corridors can be upgraded with “bio-stasis” fields that prevent nearby patients from losing health. Your hospital amenities, beyond the usual toilets and vending machines, include teleporters that warp patients and staff between hospital wings and hi-tech beacons that vaporise mess in the surrounding area, courtesy of travelling vendor Baz.
One feature that I found new, and enjoyed, was the consultant system. Consultants are unique doctors that, once unlocked by completing story missions, work for the Galacticare company as a whole and can be hired into any hospital. While they take longer to level up than regular doctors, and command a higher salary, their specific skills make them worthwhile additions. Starting consultant Twiggy Pop emits a musical aura that provides healing for patients plus either a speed boost or earnings boost for doctors, while another, Earl Prince, attracts income-boosting critters towards him and can also boost other staff’s research skills.
Another feature I like, but that I keep forgetting to use, is the ability to lock doctors to specific rooms, and to specialise treatment rooms within an illness. For example, you could lock a higher-level doctor to one Boning Chamber and set that chamber to prefer the more difficult conditions, then specialise another Boning Chamber for canisters or simpler conditions so that trainees or lower-level doctors can gain experience without endangering the riskier patients.
Each level contains a small story mission, some fairly standard and some more cleverly integrated with the gameplay. The story challenges mostly involve resolving issues for new or familiar characters by treating them individually, resolving issues by treating samples stored in canisters (the illogical nature of this approach is highlighted!) or meeting specific requirements to unlock new wings of the hospital.
After completing the story for each level, you can then choose to move on to the next hospital, or to stay in place and aim to reach the maximum 5-star rating in the current hospital. The rewards for reaching 3,4, and 5 stars have so far all been extra hospital decorations, so striving for the rankings is about personal satisfaction and enjoyment (or achievement-hunting) rather than a game requirement.
The UI for the hospital rating and performance measurements is clear and straightforward, so it’s always easy to see what aspects of the hospital are dragging down the rating. Some aspects are simple to fix, such as adding more windows to rooms to make the Vizarj staff/patients happy, or making corridors wide enough to keep the larger Kouber Baly staff/patients comfortable. Other aspects are more involved, such as the main offender for me – patient throughput. This is always the last goal I reach, as I am used to building cautiously from my experience with Two Point Hospital, where more patients automatically flow in as your hospital gets bigger and more prestigious. However, Galacticare‘s system is more controlled and, for me, more enjoyable. In Galacticare, you influence more patients to arrive by placing additional entrances and exits -known as loamgates – into the hospital. You can place as many of these as you want, wherever you want, as long as you can deal with the resulting influx of patients and pests.
A story highlight for me was level 6, which takes place in a high-security prison. Because of the tightened security, hiring outside doctors is not available, so you must rely on the existing prison staff plus your consultants. New gadgets introduced in this level (one which clones a member of staff, and one which resets a person’s specialisation) mean this restriction is not as limiting as you would expect. It adds an enjoyable difference to the gameplay – cloning the staff who best fit what you currently need – rather than a punishing one.
However, the strength of the best levels can make some other levels feel disappointingly insubstantial. Although the plot and dialogue of Chapter 7 – healing the Dyonai’s home planet, which doubles as a parental figure to the entire species – were interesting, I completed the chapter in just over an hour, and reached the 5-star rating in 80 minutes. This was because the mission mostly required dealing with 3 large surges of canisters, which I could easily afford to build extra rooms for.
So far the only major issue I’ve found with Galacticare is its lack of difficulty, which is … not a complaint I need to make often! At the moment – I’m on Chapter 8 of the campaign – money flows into each hospital so consistently that entire mechanics and strategic elements languish unneeded. For example, I don’t need to weigh up whether to add a credit-boosting upgrade to a room or to add an XP-boosting or treatment-speed-boosting upgrade instead, because the answer is always “take the other thing, there will still be enough credits”. Similarly, I don’t need to weigh up whether hiring an employee who earns me fewer credits is better or worse than hiring one with a negative trait that could harm patients, because earning fewer credits is always the safer option. This means aspects of the game, such as scrapping unused room upgrades to salvage resources to craft upgrades you actually need, and balancing salaries, are never really required in the main campaign.
However, developers Brightrock Games are aware that this is the main complaint people have highlighted so far, and have recently announced a free Challenge Mode, described as “…our response to your masochistic requests for more difficulty, suffering, and general misery. Built to be unforgiving and push players to utilise their full toolset…“. This mode seems like it will be difficult enough to make the strategic aspects of the game not only relevant, but necessary.
Overall
This feels like a predictable conclusion, but whether you will enjoy Galacticare can mostly be decided by whether you have enjoyed other management games like Two Point Hospital, Theme Hospital, or Two Point Campus. Galacticare is not a carbon copy of these games, and does have its own mechanics and new features, but it is definitely an example of the management sim genre rather than a reinvention of it.
Galacticare is, however, a particularly stylish and charming example, that excels in writing and humour. While I was slightly let down by the early game being a little repetitive due to its low challenge, and by some levels in the middle underwhelming when compared to the best levels, I have still really enjoyed my time with Galacticare so far. Currently, I’m giving it a Cool rating, but I expect to upgrade that once the more challenging mode becomes available.