Most Played: Plague Inc.
Portable genocide on your iPad
The outbreak started in Saudi Arabia. From deep in the desert came a parasite that went unnoticed until it had infected every last human being on the planet. We now know this parasite as J5N1.
We have no idea when J5N1 managed to spread across Africa and Asia, but we do know how: animals. First the birds, then the livestock, and then the rodents. Despite infecting so many hosts, it caused so few symptoms that it passed under our noses.
As the first symptoms started mutating, the medical community began work on a cure. It started with coughing, signs of anemia, and insomnia, but then came the cysts and infections. Soon people were dying in their millions each day: systemic organ failures, necrosis, paralysis, comas…
Our research team was affected too. Our progress slowed to a crawl, our research monies dried up, and we were left to fend for ourselves. There was talk of human experimentation, but soon there was no-one healthy enough to administer the vaccine trials.
It is now less than one year on and the radio is dead, the streets are quiet, and I can’t go on much longer. We are beaten. The human race is over.
The Review
I have played Plague Inc. on-and-off throughout its time on the App Store, and Ndemic Creations has created an interesting and unusual strategy game that (simplistically) simulates the spread of apocalyptic diseases.
Plague Inc. is a game about rates. The underlying gameplay is simply about number management. These numbers represent infection rates, deaths, cure progress and others, and manipulating these numbers gives this game its compelling level of strategy.
You are a plague in the making. Your first move is to choose a country to infect and then mutate to increase three basic stats: infectivity (i.e. how infectious you are), severity (i.e. how debilitating you are) and lethality (i.e. how frequently you kill your victims).
In the early stages of your disease’s life, you will need to increase you infectivity with the goal of infecting every person in every country - the hardest to infect being isolated regions such as Greenland, the Caribbean, and Madagascar. You mutate by investing DNA points given to you by reaching certain infection/death levels into different vectors (animals, blood, air, etc.), symptoms and resistance traits to manipulate the core stats.This manipulation includes random mutations and the ability to “devolve” traits to remove an unwanted
Infecting a docile population of human cattle would be too easy, so the humans react by developing a cure. Choose visible symptoms or spread to a large enough population and you will trigger a response. Your severity and lethality will then count against you as more countries invest in research to stop you from destroying the human race.
And that is the only condition for winning: total destruction. When the world is a barren wasteland, you are done. If even one person survives, then you will have failed.
The game provides variety through a range of disease types, unlocks and three difficulty levels to play with. The disease types force you to try different strategies: while you can afford to stealthily infect the world as a parasite, you won’t get very far as an extremely lethal time-released biological weapon. In addition, completing the game now unlocks additional traits that can change disease efficacy or DNA point rewards which offer further gameplay tweaks.
With an interface and presentation style that is infinitely more accessible than Pandemic 2.5, Plague Inc. is great for a short round on the toilet, the train or lunch break.
But that is not to say that the presentation is perfect, the feedback on your disease’s progress through individual countries could be made to require less menu use, and a more transparent and visible means of showing the decline of each country would be welcome too - perhaps an icon just to stop you from having to dip into the stats pages and menus.
Also, the game could also definitely stand to lose its DNA bubble feature which requires the player to touch pop-up Google Maps-like icons in exchange for DNA points to mutate your virus. However at least in this case it provides additional tangible feedback on the progress of your virus. The blue pop-ups which you touch to delay the progress of the cure don’t seem to do anything. This whole element just feels like an afterthought tacked on for platform and to give the user something to pass the time as opposed to being a well-thought out feature.
There has been a lot said about the game’s origins: it was influenced by the flash game Pandemic, which has also been released on the App Store as Pandemic 2.5. I am not going to explore that debate except to say that of the two I prefer Plague Inc. Its simpler gameplay and presentation make it far more playable on a portable device. Pandemic 2.5 simply has far too many menus and very little visual feedback on the progress of your virus. Both are available on the App Store for you to judge for yourselves.
The Breakdown
Originality:
Despite the concept being inspired heavily by the Pandemic flash game, Plague Inc. stylishly corners a very niche market in apocalypse-em-ups.
Value:
At $0.99 for a few hours of gameplay, you can’t complain. Even at that length, you will be missing out on a lot that the game has to offer.
Entertainment:
While it can get dull as you touch pop-ups and wait for your virus to spread and earn DNA, once the cure gets underway you will be working hard for your money.
Replayability:
Plenty of unlocks and different diseases to play with and no one strategy will work for everything means you will get several rounds out of Plague Inc. at the very least.
