Fever Frenzy Review

If you’re “sick” of Diner Dash-like micromanagement games, where you need to simultaneously juggle multiple tasks, you might not want to download the latest “service style” game, with a medical twist: Fever Frenzy.

Everyone else, keep on reading.

While unoriginal in concept, Fever Frenzy is fun, funny and very challenging game that takes place in various hospital settings, each with a different theme. After you choose to be a male or female doctor, your job is to cure as many impatient patients as you can while racking up the minimum number of points to complete the level.

For example, if the first city hospital, your jobs include dragging and dropping patients from the waiting area to registration and diagnosis. Then you must give them an available bed and wait on them as they require medicine (which you must bring to the nurse so she can prepare pills), give them drinks to keep them happy and then clean their beds when they’re discharged. Similar to Diner Dash, additional points are awarded for chaining two or more of the same actions together or matching a patient’s pajama color with a bed of the same color. Bonus points are given for fast speeds.

If a patient is left alone too long at any stage between admission and recovery, they die, and it will become more difficult to meet your goal. Speaking of which, a virus outbreak must be contained by hitting a button when an alarm sounds or you’ll have a major crisis on your hands.

As a humorous twist, all your patients were mysteriously turned into strange creatures, such as a cow on a head’s body (“mad cow disease”), a horse (“horse throat”) or straw man (“hay fever”). The silly sound effects and lines of dialogue are all related to their infliction; as they get better players will see them transform back to people again.

At the end of each day you can purchase upgrades from a store such as better drugs (for shorter patient recovery time), faster shoes, more charisma (make them more patient with your charm), and more.

Without giving away too much – such as the funny patients, scenarios, mini-games and bonus hospitals you’ll encounter – Fever Frenzy is spread over 40 levels that get quite tough. In fact, beginning with level 6, the game will quickly separate those novice gamers from the seasoned ones. Even without losing any of the 17 patients, it took me four attempts to reach the 8000 point minimum. Too bad you can’t restart the level when you realize you won’t make the cutoff. Instead you have to exit out to the main menu and then start again where you left off. While there are many levels here, too bad there’s only one campaign to play through.

Fever Frenzy is a very good – albeit derivative – game concept that doesn’t really offering anything new to the genre but proves to fun and very challenging micromanagement game.

The good

The bad

70 out of 100

Joel Brodie