Heart's Medicine - Doctor's Oath

I love GameHouse Time Management games and the previous three releases from Heart's Medicine were good, however, I was disappointed with this one as they changed the game. I couldn't pass the first chapter because I MUST grind the challenge episodes, not only once, or twice, nope, you need to grind them until you reach FIVE stars in order to collect those stars to unlock the next series of episodes. The map is huge and this might excite some people, but I'm here for the story! I took me four hours to play the only chapter one without succeeding in getting 90 stars! It was painfully difficult and very disappointing because you also need to collect hearts to unlock items that will allow you to upgrade items! and those items you only unlock when you play the challenges to unlock the path to them! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2142371092 Very disappointing. [i]Other reviews: [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198071375554/recommended/605990/]Heart's Medicine - Hospital Heat Review[/url] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198071375554/recommended/494230?snr=1_5_9__402]Heart's Medicine - Time to Heal Review[/url][/i] [quote]𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑐𝘩𝑒𝑐𝑘 𝑚𝑦 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑎𝑔𝑒 [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/32399565/]𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑎'𝑠 𝐶𝘩𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒[/url][/quote]

This is the worst game of the Heart's series. Here you are forced to play the same level again and again and again and again and again... just to move through the main story. Think twice before purchase. P.S. I still try to play this game just because usually don't stop half-way. But I already hate it.

I was so excited when this game finally came out on Steam. Couldn't wait to see what was next in the story. I've played 6 hours so far and most of it has been playing challenge levels over and over to collect enough stars just to unlock the next part of the story. I've only managed to get to the second area and need more stars to move on. So many challenge levels is unnecessary and the point system is terrible. The previous games it was so easy to reach 1,000 points and some levels you can just barely reach 200 or more. Patients take forever to come in which makes it even harder to earn points as well. Some people would just use the call next patient feature, but when you need that time just to earn points it's not worth using. Plus sometimes it doesn't cost time to use it and others it does, you just don't know when. I don't want to have to grind challenges or story levels just to get more of the story. The story is what I came for, but I was met with annoying challenge grinding instead. The only positive thing is that Oliver is cuter. Very disappointed.

[b]Well, the PC release sure came out timely haha.[/b] Heart’s Medicine - Doctor’s Oath is finally out for PC! Or should say that it was able to be ported over as those that played the series on PC were told that it wasn’t possible last year (I still held out hopes though). In Doctor’s Oath, the Little Creek team is still getting used to being at Queensburrow. Not only does Queensburrow have a staff that isn’t too inviting, they have multiple systems in place that the Little Creek team finds weird. Though, the worst has to be that Allison is now interning under a different doctor, Dr. Ermey, during her last rotation. Dr. Ermey doesn’t like Allison and is looking for anything to fail her. He even has Aubrey as his star student (bleh). Of course, this isn’t the only thing Allison has to deal with. A new patient, named Grant, comes in with a mysterious disease and, due to a certain star student, infects a handful of doctors. Now Allison and the rest of the uninfected doctors must find a way to save their fellow colleagues before time runs out. I have to warn you guys, the story for this installment gets very sad. Doctor’s Oath plays similarly to Gamehouse’s previous games. Each level, patients will enter your department to get treated. You need to assign them to the station they need to be at and then set Allison to treat them in a timely manner so you can get a sweet quick bonus or keep them from leaving in anger. Sometimes, it’s just a simple treatment where Allison just needs to do a check, choose the right choice between multiple choices, the patient needs an item (which can be a single item or one you need to combine), or you need to do a minigame (weirdly enough, there are no gesture treatments). Most of the minigames are new and correspond with which department you’re in. Once they’re all done, all you’ll need to do is check them out. In addition, you’ll have the classic optional find Oliver task as well as a challenge. At the end, you’ll be granted hearts and stars based on your score. However, there are some significant changes made since Hospital Heat for better or for worse. One addition that I’m not surprised about is the ability to call in patients early. If you complete the level early, as well as having all your stations clean, you’ll get bonus points. However, the main aspect that I hated, and I have seen complaints on for both mobile and PC, is having to do each level multiple times. You can’t get all the stars on your first go if you’re that good anymore. After the first couple of story levels, you’ll be generally getting only one star, maybe two, on your first try. Your score is accumulated with each try and this often requires you to play a level at least three times to get all five stars. This is due to the mobile version introducing an energy system which depleted by 20 every time you played a level. Though, you do get some help with the addition of boosters. These boosters will boost something specific so you can hopefully get a higher score like being able to walk faster, giving you an additional tray slot, more mini-game/level time, or having Olivers spawn in more. You’ll get boosters every time you level up, from chests, or you can buy more with diamonds. The chapter maps are also very different than before. Instead of the usual curvy line with the occasional challenge level, the map is dominated with a ton of challenge levels. Around the routes, there are chests that you’ll need to complete a task before opening (like finding Oliver 200 times), card stacks, and a spot that will give you more hearts. There are also character puzzles that you’ll need to get puzzle pieces by completing challenges. Once you get all of them and place them, you’ll get a story scene and diamonds. However, the paths are blocked by star gates. These star gates require you to have so many stars to unlock so you can continue with the story or block challenge levels that lead to a chest, card pack, or hearts. Due to this, you’ll need to often go back and grind out levels (if you didn’t play each level multiple times already) to continue. You’ll need a whopping 720 stars to finish the story. I’m not a fan of this either for obvious reasons. This seems like it was due to the energy system as well. I did do a test to see if this was really a problem or not. I went totally crazy and 100% the first chapter, which took me about six hours for 190 stars. I then played every level afterwards only once, unless I didn’t complete the challenge, and that lasted me until the lock that would open Chapter 5. In Chapter 4, I came across not having enough stars for even the locks blocking challenge levels and had 386 stars out of the needed 450. Additionally, I kept track of how many stars I achieved only in Chapter 2 and it left me 70 stars short from what was required to move on to Chapter 3. You can unlock the star locks with diamonds instead, but I don’t recommend doing this on the PC version as you don’t buy diamonds with real money. They’re limited as you only get a diamond when you first get it from challenges, from completing the character puzzles, or the handful of challenge levels that just give you diamonds, otherwise you get some once you level up. Not to mention the diamonds are used to unlock extra scenes in the photo album as you need to buy each individual part (which for some photos are quite pricey). Anyway, the challenge levels, which most of them will be familiar. There are the basic challenge levels; guinea pig levels that has you finding Oliver, Punky (adds more time), and Olive (gives extra hearts); time trials allows you to call an unlimited number of patients and will either have a challenge that goes with it (like getting a certain score in the first half or checking out a ton of patients) or one that can be on the regular challenge (like patients losing hearts very quickly or finding items); and lastly the minigame challenges that will just have you do one or a couple mini-games. The upgrades have also changed. Instead of upgrades being available from the start as long as you have enough coins, here it’s based on upgrade cards and require hearts for payment. Apart from a couple of cards being granted at the beginning, you need to open chests or card stacks to get more and some of them are available in other chapters. This is a little bit weird, but some challenges do put you in a previous department and you might have to go back to grind out stars anyway. These upgrades improve the patient’s patience, add in an additional station, gives you an additional tray slot forever, and how fast they and Allison walk, but there are upgrades that improve how many hearts an item/station will give you. Depending on the level and if the challenge requires you to get to a certain point threshold, those heart upgrades can be required to at least get one star your first try without a booster (otherwise, it’ll take two tries) or complete the challenge. Two other upgrade shops were added in though: the mini-game upgrades that’ll give you two extra seconds or double the points for one minigame and the Oliver upgrades that will increase the amount of points and the spawn rates of the special guinea pigs named Punky and Olive. These upgrades get pretty expensive fast which quickly makes the mini-game upgrades useless and the Oliver upgrades only worth it for the Oliver challenges that you can’t complete even with boosters (which might be due to the mobile version letting you double your score by watching ads). Once you complete the whole game, you’ll unlock Elite Mode. This will start you at the very beginning, but adds in 12 new levels, two new patients, a new guinea pig, 12 new shop items, two new stories, and is slightly harder than Normal Mode. Honestly, I wasn’t really up to restarting by the end of my playthrough, but it’s there if you want to play even more. [h1]Verdict in Comments![/h1]

extremely grindy game! for a 2020 game, the animations are ok-ish. the story is decent. still, if you played the previous parts, you will be heavily disappointed. this game is just a grindfest, especially if you are a completionist. please don't, and i repeat: please don't buy this game unless you can get it for a huge discount (80+%). Paying any other price will send a wrong message to the developpers who should feel ashamed for creating a game like this, especially in the light of previous releases.

I've waited 2 years for this game to be released on the PC platform and Steam, I've wasted 70 hours just to complete it on normal mode. Then there is an elite mode just for a few stories added that's not even part of the main story, I don't understand why it's not there in the first place. It's ridiculous!! I'm really disappointed that you can't unlock achievements, you play your ass off for NOTHING!! There is no sense of achievement by finishing the game, I unlocked 5 stars in all the challenge levels and story levels by repeating each level up to 7 times. This game is exhausting, I couldn't wait to finish it. I'm disappointed in the minimum of story levels, there's tons of challenge levels that's just a pain to complete for a simple puzzle piece. I'm a huge fan of the story itself, but recommending this game to anyone will haunt me knowing they too will waste it away!!

While I would recommend this game, I am more neutral towards it in comparison to past installments in the series due to the changes in game mechanics. In Doctor's Oath, the engaging story from past games can still be found here. However, they are heavily locked behind grinding of new "challenge levels". Given that Doctor's Oath first debut as a free mobile game, it is likely the introduction of the new 5-Stars system in each level was meant to capitalize on that to encourage free players to purchase the game, or unlock story levels with diamonds. You will not get 5 stars in your first playthrough of most, if not all levels, beyond the first few levels in the first chapter. You will need to grind the stages repeatedly to get enough score for the full 5-stars if you are a completionist. Moreover, story stages are locked behind a large number of stars that will definitely require you to play through the challenge stages, and obtain at least a few stars across ALL stages to move onto the next chapter. You will also find yourself grinding "hearts" which are the currency to purchase upgrades for each ward, and they get increasingly pricy in each subsequent chapter. You will be grinding ALOT for stars and hearts. As of my 11 hours, I've only finished chapter 3 out of 6, most of which were spent on repeating challenge modes and grinding the hell out of certain stages that net the most hearts to upgrade current and previous chapter wards. Frankly, given that the game had been made buy-to-play on steam, the developers should had changed the current mechanics, keeping a maximum of 3-stars with a reasonable score for each stage, and a fixed amount of hearts and diamonds given that ensure that each ward can be completed by the end of each chapter, with OPTIONAL retries of a stage. Personally, while I enjoy the extra challenges from the challenge stages, the game is VERY, VERY grind heavy.

Oof where do I begin? I don't want to say I "don't recommend" this game because it has an interesting story so far and the map concept is new. I wish I could do a "mixed" review instead. When I opened the game and saw the map, I was like "wow this is a lot, but it won't be too bad?" Playing levels over and over again to get a full 5 stars is kind of silly. There was nothing wrong with the previous map format that is used for many of the Gamehouse games! I know the game devs probably just wanted to try something new but it's too much! Honestly, if you're just in the game for the story, don't even worry about all the side stuff and only do them if you need more stars to pass on and unlock the next story stages. However I am a big completionist and haven't even finished the first area and I'm almost 4 hours in... Again, I shouldn't have to play a level 3-5 times to complete it. You don't need to fix something if it's not broken. I know some previous games were getting complaints that the levels were "too easy" but this isn't a good solution to fix that. Again, I don't hate this game and I don't think it's super terrible. I just have mixed feelings about it. I love these kind of games because they're fun, relaxing, and I like the challenge! This one was just too busy. This new grinding format just reminds me of mobile games. So if you love Heart's Medicine, go ahead, try it out! But keep all of these things in mind because it is much different than the previous games in the series.

Блин, так ждала новую часть медицины и такой слом ожиданий. Первый и главный разочаровывающий момент: игра сильно сменила вектор с скилла скоростного менеджмента на гринд-гринд-гринд. Раньше, чтоб пройти уровень на 3 звезды нужно было пройти его идеально, отточить навык. Сейчас чтобы пройти на 5 звезд нужно просто пройти его много раз. Один и тот же уровень. Даже не обязательно хорошо, просто много) Второе разочарование просто в каше механик: открытие пакетиков с картами новых предметов (куда ж нынче без карт), прокачка персонажа, пазлы, основная сюжетная ветка и куча побочных, принудительно стопорящих твое основное прохождение. Карта уровней почти как древо навыков в ПОЕ. Зачем-то слишком усложнили.. Ну и мелочь, но неприятно: отсутствие ачивок( Грустно. Я так тебя ждала, а в итоге не смогла терпеть всего этого бессмысленного г.... гринда.

I have the same complaint as most, being I fell in love with this series for the story telling. The old versions having a few challenges in between is just fine, but this one, you need to grind through an ocean of useless challenges just to get to more story, or to get upgrades you need to make game play worth while. I waited so long for this and played it all day as soon as it dropped and I'm barely at the end of the second area. I can't even express how disappointed I am. :(