Recent reviews by aaronjamesflack

I love this game, but I would also love to see a Two Point Hospital 2 that takes the learnings from Campus and Museum and applies them back to the original game. Imagine hiring doctors and nurses with a clear base specialism, instead of fiddling around with recruits just to train and min-max a “perfect” GP or surgeon. One of my biggest frustrations in Hospital was ending up with odd combinations, like a surgeon with psychiatry. I wanted staff who did one job and did it well: ward nurses, pharmacists, GPs, surgeons, diagnostic nurses, treatment nurses, and so on.

Introduce legendary or mythic staff that can be unlocked with unique, powerful perks. For example, a doctor with a radiation mutation who can process X-Ray, Mega-Scan, and any future radiology machines much faster than anyone else, with a boosted diagnostic score on top.

Bring in long-term patients and expand the ward system. A general ward should exist alongside a long-term ward with different beds and facilities for entertainment, forcing players to juggle space. Surgical patients could require a pre- and post-op ward stay instead of going straight home. That gap in realism has always bugged me.

Diagnostics also need more variety. Treatments in the original TPH were wacky, weird, and wonderful, but diagnostics felt like a boring clog in the workflow. Adding more diagnostic routes and options would keep things fresh.

The building system should evolve too. The original game restricted you to set buildings, but Campus and Museum introduced flexible construction. That should carry across, with the possibility of outdoor requirements. For instance, in Campus, student health dropped if they stayed indoors all the time. Hospitals could take a similar approach with patient wellbeing.

Research should be more seamless, with a proper multi-stage tree to unlock new cures, diagnostic tools, training programs, and even unique staff abilities.

On the social side, more options for food and drink would be great. Think cafés on the scale of Museum and gift shops to match.

Finally, events need more variety. The contagion event was mostly just a pain. I’d rather see a range of dynamic events: staff strikes, pandemic breakouts that flood the hospital, or other scenarios that force the player to adapt on the fly.

Good game in principle but still has some bugs. The biggest one, that has actually caused me to have a hard block is staff freezing. Occasionally, when staff do a task; go to the toilet, go on an expedition etc. the staff member freezes and no long will do anything until they eventually get so dissatisfied they quit. The issue is, right now I am trying to launch an expedition, but my staff froze, and won't go on it. I tried building a room on top of the staff to try and reset them, nothing happened. (You cant pick them up, you cant alter their pay, you can't interact with them at this point). So yeah, stuck now, can not progress. Some other little bugs with pathing too, but nothing too major. Hopefully these bugs are sorted.

This is the first time I wished a DLC was more expensive.

100% proceeds donation is amazing, and the speed you guys put this beautiful pack together is awesome.

This is where I wished Steam had a "sort of" option. Tavern Master is a wonderful little game, but I find myself bored after 5 or so hours.

This game has so much potential - let me explain.

First - this game hits me hard in the nostalgia . This game, feels like, plays like, and even looks a little like the tycoon games of old. You start of with a small, half build tavern. The campaign starts you by finishing the building, placing a table, benches and some lights. After that, it is kind of on you to work out everything else.... and I love that. The freedom to build, place, optimise as I wish, from a very early part of the game reminds me of classic builder tycoon games from the mid/late 00's.

A lot of my issues come about an hour in, when you hit the mid game. It becomes a grind fest. You are constantly waiting for ingredients to come in through your adventurers, you maximise your building size, you place the two bars you are limited to at this point, you max out all the staff you can currently employee, you bash your own head in when the challenges take so long to complete. Rinse, and repeat for another 2 hours. I find it so odd, that you unlock the second floor relatively early, but then have to wait to the very end of the game [/i] to get the third and fourth floor.

I am not kidding - literally, the last 4 research items at the end of the game, include the 3rd and 4th floors.

Once you get over the grind that is the mid game, the late game feels flat... empty... soulless. Why? Well by this point, money is no longer a limitation, you suddenly can expand your tavern to it's largest size, but there doesn't feel any point to it. The game just fizzles out. You keep placing Lux tables over and over, and you spiral into oblivion. On top of that, managing staff is a nightmare at this point, and frankly I had to give up.

This is such a shame.

But there is so much potential.

Things I would love to see in this game / things that need improvement

- Clean up the UI. The old school aesthetic is charming, but it is a pain the backside managing staff in it's current format. I would also love to see it made easier to assign staff, manage staff and manage the floors they work on.

- Make it easier to assign staff to floors (it is not helpful that a staff member can only be assigned to serve a single floor, or all the floors. In my build, it would have really benefited to assign specific multiple floors to my bartenders and servers).

- More Content & More Customisation. One of my biggest issues is that there is not enough option for me to make my tavern my own. There is currently a very limited number of tables, benches, decorations (oh and please give us the option to filter these), carpets etc. On top of that, I would love some more textures, colours and designs for walls, doors, windows and floors. More menu items would be great too.

- Give me more map variety, and bigger maps, with weather. I want to work with wacky plots, which require irregular building shapes, natural terrain blocks I have to work around, and more biomes to work with. I would love to see cold maps, where outside seating and open walls causes unhappiness, and you have to place lots of fireplaces keep the happiness up. I would love to see hot desert maps, where you need to use more of the trellis style walls to keep staff and guests happy and cool. It would add a bit of extra flavour.

- Random events. The thief and guard system is POINTLESS at the moment. It did not take me long to get enough $ to give my guard all the best equipment. I never once, in both plays have a single successful thief steal from me (bare from the first one that unlocks the guard). I would love to see some more random events like raiding parties, barbarian attacks, brigands trying to extort you etc to give your security more of a challenge, and to make you think how you go about securing your tavern. It would also make the mid-game much more interesting.

- Grade customer type to surroundings, furniture and decorations. One thing for me, that I struggled with... Royalty class customers sitting in basic cheap bench next to commoners, sat on lux stools. What would be really cool, is to have it so higher tiered customer types, prefer or demand certain tiers or quality of furnishings. Maybe Royalty guests can only be in the same room as Yellow (I can't remember that classes name!!), and only have Lux quality furniture to sit on, or higher. Perhaps commoners can not mingle with Rare, Yellow or Royalty. Perhaps, rare customers prefer more decorations than the Yellows, and the Yellows prefer bookcases and telescopes and things. It would just give planning and placing more flavour.



All in all I feel I have slated a game which I actually rather like. I think the Dev has built the foundations of a great game. It is like I say, it has so much potential, and there is so much that can be done. I want to stress, I recommend this game. It is cheap, and dev seems keen on adding more stuff and updating it. I would say it is worth a purchase and see what happens. Even if nothing is ever added or changed, you will get a good 10 hours of enjoyment out of it in it's current state.

The Emmerson household is complaining about garbage build up.

Build new Incinator.

Go back to the Emmerson's.... the house has burnt down.

Well there is no more garbage then.

10/10

It is always a treat to play Prison Architect and a joy to see a game on early access worth playing!