Relish wielding the power of life and death over aliens in space? No, it’s not time for another Alien game. Instead, Galacticare is a management simulation game where you, as the Director, manage hospitals in space with aliens as your staff and patients.
Reminiscent of Startopia and Theme Hospital games, Galacticare is a light-hearted sim featuring different scenarios by chapters as well as sandbox play.
Developed by an indie studio, Brightrock Games, and offered as part of the Xbox Game Pass, Galacticare was surprisingly addictive and got me hooked for a few hours!
Doctors without borders
You play the Director of Galacticare, a nomadic healthcare provider in space. Although the location of your hospital changes depending on where your intergalactic clients require support, your team of quirky staff members are constantly supporting your ventures.
These include HEAL, an artificial-intelligence executive assistant with an uppity British accent who is full of wisecracks, Orion the CEO who comes up with new innovative healthcare treatments, and the humble Medibot who is naive, enthusiastic, and is prone to being bullied by HEAL.
The game is easy to pick up even if you are unfamiliar with management games. With its drag and drop interface and gradual introduction of various ailments and treatments, each scenario is manageable for newbies.
Better yet, the game doesn’t rush you to build up treatment rooms from the start, and there is time to earn enough money before expanding your hospital with the right facilities and staff.
For a good customer experience, amenities like toilets, vending machines and seats also need to be in ample supply, otherwise you will see dissatisfied patients and a lower rating for the hospital.
Despite the many demands, I found the game quite forgiving even when I was tardy in building up sufficient capacity to treat the patients as there are some “shortcuts” that can be used to solve problems, which makes for a low stress, almost cosy gaming experience.
Even the occasional patient death is just a minor inconvenience, with a slight delay in reopening the treatment room and temporary negative impact on patients.
Medical mystery
Galacticare challenges you with different interesting scenarios, from treating patients from the “Burning Moon” music festival, building the hospital in a busy train terminal, and treating inmates in a prison with multiple wings.
Maximising space to build treatment rooms and sufficient clear space to handle patient flow efficiently is critical to shorten treatment time and overcrowding, as well as turning in profits fast.
Different ailments require different treatment rooms, and waves of patients can occur that lead to long queues for certain treatments which leads to bottlenecking, and occasionally death. The challenge is ensuring that the doctors are efficient and patients are comfortable (and not die!) while waiting their turn.
The treatments are imaginative and hilarious, and can be zoomed in to be fully appreciated. These include “Projectile medicine” that uses something like a flamethrower to blast a patient, or a Centrifuge to spin patients around to cure motion sickness.
Each scenario also features unique ailments that you, as the Director, need to ensure that your hospital has sufficient staff, facilities and capacity to support them. This also means substantial investment on your part, and investing on the most critical treatments, research and tools.
The game makes it easy as treatment rooms are built almost instantly, and if you are pressed for time, you can simply “copy and paste” existing rooms to cope with the crunch.
Thankfully, money is easy to come by with randomly generated events, such as VIP high-rollers who are willing to pay a lot for fast treatment, as well as clicking on some shiny bugs known as Solarks roaming around your hospital who will give you 3,500 credits instantly.
Managing the hospital well will also lead to a higher rating and unlock more rewards, such as room upgrades, useful shortcuts and unique decorations.
There are plenty of ways to make good use of profits, from researching new ailments, to upskilling your doctors’ expertise, to upgrading treatment rooms for more efficiency or better quality of treatments.
If you manage to save up a lot of moolah, you can afford to purchase some exorbitant shortcuts from Baz the roaming merchant that will help in completing the missions.
For instance, if you have a pest problem, buying pest traps and more Medibots to clean up the premises will help. Or if your patients face long waits for the treatment rooms and tend to die during the wait, you can imbibe them Stabilising potions or install Bio-statis beacons to keep them alive.
Once the hospital is up and running, there is plenty of fire-fighting with random events such as VIP or colossal clients, a sudden influx of patients with the same affliction or treatment rooms being destroyed by meteors.
By analysing the long queues, popular ailments and training inexperienced doctors as well as investing in an army of Medibots, you can quickly fix the problems.
Bedside manner
Galacticare features many different alien species as your patients, and may be employed as doctors and consultants. Available doctors for hire will be shown in a roster, with different abilities, specialisations as well as drawbacks.
For instance, some are litterbugs, others are sadists and enjoy hurting patients, while others require more visits to the toilet, which affects their productivity.
Most of the aliens you encounter, both staff and patient are good-natured and humourous, with plenty of witty dialogue. However, there were times I got so busy managing the hospital that I tuned out on conversations, neglected answering the calls and missed some interesting random encounters.
During the downtime, if any, I enjoy being a kaypoh (busybody) and snooping on the patients, seeing their thoughts and spying on their actions, and some are just plain weird. Even the villains are only mildly malicious, and are amusing in their feeble attempts to sabotage Galacticare.
There are even colossal patients too large to get into the hospital and need to be treated from a distance. Galacticare has a shuttle that can be deployed to perform biopsies and send treatments to colossal patients, but since the colossals are large, the required treatment will also take a much longer time to prepare. This means managing a balance between treating them for profits and existing patients to save lives.
One such colossal is Baz, the roaming merchant who is treated by Galacticare early in the game and comes by occasionally to offer free and extremely useful items.
These include treatment room upgrades and consumables to keep patients alive and equipment from breaking down. You can also create these items when you harvest enough “Crafties”, which are pink critters roaming around your hospital.
There are also timed events that you need to prioritise and put other patients on hold, such as high-rolling VIP clients who are prepared to pay, which seem unfair but realistic in a profit-driven healthcare system. So much for altruism and the Hippocratic Oath!
How well your hospital is doing is reflected by a five-star rating. However, I felt too much weightage for a good review score was focused on decorations — shouldn’t a hospital be minimalistic and clean?
With a wide variety of decorations, including lights, plants, posters, curios and rugs, and different aliens having different tastes in decor, the result is a pretty cluttered hospital to satisfy everyone.
On the whole, the game is rather shallow for a management game with forgiving challenges and convenient shortcuts, but it does offer some chuckles with witty dialogue and quirky characters.
Its sandbox mode with random incidents and drop-in clients also add some unpredictability to the gameplay, which makes it engaging.
TL;DR
If you are looking for a relaxing management game with interesting characters to meet, and the satisfaction of healing and profiteering, Galacticare is the right prescription. With plenty of humour, quirky characters and witty dialogue, Galacticare is a blast to play and good for a few chuckles.
However, the easy way of making money and many convenient shortcuts available to overcome problems means that the game isn’t very challenging and quite shallow.
The game is suitable for older kids since it does have some crude humour and slightly strong language, but it is easy enough for novice gamers to pick up and enjoy.
Be warned that managing Galacticare is an addictive experience and you won’t feel time passing as waves of patients whose lives you can save start flooding your beautifully decorated hospital and when money starts rolling in.
Galacticare is available free on Xbox Game Pass on Xbox Series X|S and PC, and can be purchased at S$43.50 on Steam or Microsoft Store.
