With the current hysteria that the Swine Flu epidemic has caused, it's quite ironic to come across a title such as Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward. At first glance it seems to take a lot from Theme Hospital, which itself was a very humorous and involving experience with its similarly cartoony hospital setting; however, Hysteria Hospital will have to offer a lot more than the standard American medical insurance scheme that it's taking advantage of here.

Stepping into the disinfected shoes of a nurse (male or female), you need to organise your ward and direct the patients to treat their conditions as quickly as possible. Emergency Ward feels like a cross between Theme Hospital, Diner Dash and The Sims; the action is viewed from an isometric angle and you can design and improve your ward for decreasing the death rate and increasing life-saving efficiency. There are seven different wards to visit in all, beginning with your local Maryland clinic right through to New York Central Hospital with stops along the way at towns such as Albuquerque. As well as the Story mode there's an Endless mode, where the number of patients you need to save increases with each level; essentially you need to make as much money and cure as many patients as you can within the time limit.

There are two main actions to contend yourself with in Hysteria Hospital: moving patients between departments and controlling your nurse, the central figure and the key to keeping everything running smoothly within the ward. Your responsibilities include administrating prescriptions, operating and maintaining machines, treating illnesses and making sure you clean up after your patients - cleanliness is a major issue, because dirty beds equals unhappy patients!

When a patient enters the hospital, their first stop is the triage doctor, who you direct them to simply by dragging and dropping them into the triage department. After examination, an icon appears displaying where they need to go next, such as for an x-ray or to see the dentist. If a patient can't be treated in the hospital then you can use the ambulance to send them elsewhere. Each patient is also given a prescription that you must collect from the pharmacy; their health indicator (a little heart above the patient) decreases as they wait for treatment and if it empties completely then they leave the hospital unhappy. When they are being prescribed treatment, their heart fills back up and once the patient is feeling better, they leave the hospital and the cost of their stay is luckily covered by their medical insurance (God bless America!) - but the insurance company only pays out on completed treatments (God damn insurers!).

After each level you can buy and sell medical equipment whilst also adjusting three managerial criteria, and the higher the level, the greater the range available for purchase, increasing your ability to meet patients' needs. However, these machines need to be maintained, further adding to your costs. Before each level you get a chance to splash out on increasing the efficiency of medical staff and the pharmacist whilst also reducing the risk of malfunctioning equipment - but caution is needed, because if you don't meet the increased budgetary requirements then you'll lose the level!

If your first thoughts are along lines of "Oh it looks a lot like Theme Hospital" then you would be right to begin with, as the cartoony graphics are very similar. However, that's unfortunately where the similarity ends, because in Theme Hospital each level and new hospital brought a new feature, a new disaster to avoid and so on. In Hysteria Hospital, each level pretty much plays the same, the only difference being the targets set, i.e. one level charges you with curing five patients and making £1500 and then in the next you need to save six patients and make £1600. That's the main problem with Hysteria Hospital: there isn't a great deal of variety on offer. Sure, the targets change, but you're just moving patient after patient to one room to the next. Once you get to the later levels you have to contend with moving between floors too, which unfortunately isn't as smooth as it should be. This is because you can only view one floor at a time and considering that the DS has two screens, it's a big omission that the developers didn't use this to their advantage. Also, every hospital seems to have been designed by the same architect, the only noticeable differences being the colour scheme.

For the most part, dragging and dropping the patients works quite effortlessly without any problems. You can move around the hospital without too much trouble either, although there are a few problems when you try to clean and a character is in the way. Also, for some reason the X-ray machine has a small designated area that you can touch to get working, whereas the other machines can be practically touched anywhere to get started. Grabbing the prescriptions (small, token-looking icons with a number that corresponds to the patient it belongs to) is an easy process to perform. Luckily, you can map a route around the hospital, so you can clean, drop off dirty linen, pick up prescriptions and then give them to the designated patients via a set of stylus taps. In Theme Hospital the patients travelled to the treatment rooms themselves, but in this case you need to drag and drop them, which a lot less fun than the developers perhaps thought it would have been. It's just so time consuming and repetitive, with the one-minute loop of music and the same half dozen sprites being used on each level further adding to the tedium. There are even occasions when the same graphic model appears onscreen more than once.

Each level lasts only a matter of minutes, which is a good thing, as anything longer than the five minutes on offer per stage would become frustratingly boring rather than just simply boring. The introduction of new treatment equipment is short lived, as too many beds take up the wards and you can only sell equipment that you've bought, not the beds themselves. It isn't until the very end that you may have needed to fill the four beds that are always available. When you have to navigate between different floors you at least experience a slightly different challenge for five minutes or so, but the execution is poor. Why can only one patient use the lift (or elevator for you Americans out there) at a time? Why is there a pharmacy on each floor but not a nurse on each floor? Many issues like this make planning your approach much more problematic, and they make little sense.

The main problem though is that there simply isn't enough to the game when just a bit more innovation could have made the experience much more enjoyable. Take Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for instance, where instead of just stealing a car you have to hotwire it or crack the security service. Why can't you attempt to prescribe the drugs yourself or manually tune dials when you have to fix machines? Sadly such ideas can't be found in Hysteria Hospital; it's simply a case of perfecting your time management skills, which for the most part isn't anywhere near as fun as it could have been - although, if you do fancy killing a few patients then the Endless mode will have you dragging and dropping until your stethoscope can take no more!

This game doctor is diagnosing Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward as having contracted a terminal case of tedium, with symptoms that include repetitiveness and tiresome gameplay. In fact, playing Hysteria Hospital is very similar to having the flu; there's the novelty of enjoying a couple of days off from work, but once that's over, all you're left with is a feeling of fatigue and a heartfelt wish that you could be doing something a lot more enjoyable instead.

Reviewed by Christopher McNally for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).