Galacticare Review

thesixthaxis.com:

You know Theme Hospital and Two Point Hospital? Well, what if you made a hospital management game a lot like those management sim classics, but shot it up into the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism? Space! That’s Galacticare in a (space) nutshell.

Of course, space healthcare is really just a vast expanse for capitalism to exploit and your goal as the administrator of a series of Galacticare space stations is to build them up into effective and profitable healthcare institutions. There’s a decently lengthy campaign to progress through, with a sequence of story missions to beat and some pure sandbox maps alongside. It starts off in Earth’s orbit, takes you to provide for Burning Moon music festival, has you tend to a gigantic space farm, a space prison full of clones, and more.

As you’d expect from this corner of the management sim genre, there’s all manner of weird and wonderful diseases that you’ll encounter, including ones that turn people into star fields, give them metal craniums, a bit of jellification, and on and on. Treating them? Well, the Boning Chamber is there to use an industrial robot dog to gobble up and recombine patient with new bones, there’s lasers, giant guns, skin generating tanks, and on and on.

It’s all laced with a pleasing sense of humour, very much in keeping with its inspirations, and that’s aided by the narrative and characters. From the computer’s put downs of the janitor bot, to the quirky alien inflections, and the Matt Berry-adjacent rival CEO, each scenario is given a lot of flavour by these characters. That, and the wonderful evolving space backdrops that you should absolutely keep an eye on as you work through a stage.

The fundamentals of hospital management will be immediately familiar, as you put reception by the entrance, then fill the rest of the space with a growing range of treatment rooms, seating and items to fulfil patient wants and needs. And there’s a lot of wants and needs, as each race has particular