Plague Inc
Developers: Ndemic Creations LTD
iTunes Rating: 4.5 Stars (937 ratings as of 17 June 2012)
Game Center?: Yes
Version Details: 1.2 (released 12 June 2012)
Age Rating: 9+
Price: £0.69
Plague Inc. is a pandemic simulating strategy game similar to Pandemic 2.5. Although they are very similar in concept, Plague Inc. has revolutionised the gameplay and expanded on what Pandemic started. With more gameplay elements and a different approach to the pandemic simulation genre (is it really a genre?) Plague Inc is definitely worth a look at!
Gameplay
The game play in Plague Inc is very similar to that in Pandemic 2.5, infect the whole world with a disease and try to kill everyone while your “opponent” the governments of the world, try to stop you. I’m going to try and do this objectively, although Pandemic 2.5 and Plague Inc. are very similar, I’m going to try and hold back from comparing the two games too much in this review.
So the game starts off with choosing a difficulty, Casual, Normal or Brutal. If you want to unlock new content (which I’ll get to shortly) you have to play on Normal upwards, which is good although I’ve yet to finish the game with a bacteria on Normal so haven’t unlocked anything. The next stage is to choose your type of disease, of which there are 7; Bacteria, Virus, Fungus, Parasite, Prion, Nano-Virus and Bio-Weapon. You unlock each new disease type by completing the game on Normal or Brutal with the previous disease type; for example completing the game on Normal with a Fungus would unlock Parasites. Also on this menu are links to 2 sub-menus; Unlock and Special. Unlock is a menu to unlock things with in app purchases! (shakes fist) You can unlock the next pathogen type for £0.69 all of them for £1.99 and also the 3 cheats for £2.99.
Although I’m against these, Ndemic seem to have a tongue-in-cheek approach to them, almost saying out right, “Yes we are charging people for the ability to cheat and take away from the lifespan of our game, and we don’t care!” I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this, I am against in app purchases because most companies implement them incorrectly, but from the ones I’ve run into in my time these seems to be the least bad. They only add to the gameplay – especially the cheats, and if people want to pay for them it’s a single player game so it’s really no issue of mine whether they do so.
Anyway back to the gameplay! The cheats are pretty much God-Mode in their effects; Immune Plague – no cure development; Hidden Plague – no governments; Unlimited Plague – Infinite DNA points. So yeah, they sound like they pretty much make the game impossible to lose and I’m not sure if these would even be fun to play with activated? However to unlock them (without paying £2.99) you have to finish the game with all 7 types onf Brutal, so it pretty much is an end game extra.
Once you’ve chosen a disease type you can choose a name and then it’s into the game. You get to choose where you start off in Plague Inc. tapping a country/region will start your disease off in that area, which I think is a nice touch and adds more strategy to the game. Do you start off in a land locked country? Or on an island with lots of air and water traffic? The actual gameplay at this point is pretty much the same as Pandemic 2.5; infect new people, spread to new countries gaining DNA points and evolving your disease to gain new benefits. The genes in Plague Inc. are split into 3 categories Transmission, Symptoms and Abilities. Transmission genes are different ways off passing on such as animal hosts, air and water. Symptoms are the symptoms infected people will show and change the three variables for your disease; infectivity, severity and lethality. Abilities are your resistances to different environmental factors such as cold and heat and also a few special genes which I’m guessing will change depending on what type of disease you are.
Evolution points are earned in two ways in Plague Inc. The first is the same way as they’re earned in Pandemic, spreading to new hosts and killing old ones. However you get various floating bubbles in Plague Inc. that you can pop for benefits. The first you encounter are Orange bonus point bubbles, these appear at random in any country you have infected, and simply pop it to gain a few points (usually 2-4) before it disappears. The next are Red infection bubbles, these appear once you spread to a new country or region, pop it for a medium boost (5-10). The final bubbles don’t give you points but instead help you combat vaccine research, these bubbles are Blue and popping them adds to the time that a cure will be finished.
These additions make Plague Inc. much more interactive and fun to play and if I really (gun to my head) had to make a decision between Plague Inc and Pandemic 2.5, I would have to pick Plague Inc.
It’s more interactive, the menus are bolder and the graphics are more sleek and intuitive, however there are a few things about it that I feel don’t need to be there. The world menu has links to a lot of graphs that show repeated data that you can find somewhere else and in much nicer formats. The infection spread summary is really the only one I use in this data sub-menu but there’s also a graph to show the breakdown of the population (as well as a pie chart and numbers in the main world menu AND numbers of infected and dead on the main screen) a graph to show the cure progress (in addition to the main world menu’s cure graphic AND the same thing repeated in the cure sub-menu of the world menu...) and a disease graph which shows how your infectivity, severity and lethality have changed over time (the main levels of which can found on the gene evolution screen).
Basically what I’m getting at here is most of that data submenu can be found in other places and honestly I feel it’s just added to try and make it “better” than Pandemic, which although it had boring looks, had all its information either in the world screen or shown on the main screen of the game, much tidier and professional.
Addictivity - 10/10
Again, I got completely drawn in to this game and as I said, the addition of a few extras, mainly the bubbles, makes the game more interactive. So rather than staring a screen of numbers changing, waiting for new evolution points, you get to pop a bubble every now and again in the dry spells.
The game is a lot harder than Pandemic, or maybe I haven’t adapted to the different gameplay style of Plague Inc. just yet. I’ve yet to finish the game once on Normal although I’ve done it a couple of times on Casual. The game does seem to be more user friendly than Pandemic although it seems a bit dumbed down at the same time. The ways of unlocking new genes is completely different to Pandemic and I honestly don’t like it as much. To get to higher level genes you have to follow paths in different places, and unlocking a gene in a section (e.g. Symptoms) increases the price of all genes in the section, which again I don’t like. Some of the unlocks are crazily expensive too and take a while to save up for and as you can’t see all the genes at once and the prices depend on how many you’ve unlocked, it can be hard to plan too far ahead in Plague Inc.
Another extra though that I love is addition of mutation. Your disease can mutate a symptom gene randomly, unlocking it without using any points, however these are usually low level or following a path, they very rarely follow the path you want though and can maybe unlock something that you don’t want.
Controls - 9/10
The controls are mainly all menu driven as in Pandemic, and the menus in Plague Inc. are beautiful to look at and easy to understand so the controls are simple. The only complaints I have about the controls are the bubbles are small and sometimes when I tap one it doesn’t pop and disappears before I can get it.
Menus - 9/10
The menus in Plague Inc. are beautiful. They’re very nicely designed and are easy to follow, although I don’t like the gameplay mechanic of unlocking the genes through pathways, they’re amazing to look at, however not showing the complete pathway is a bit bad I think. Maybe if they’re greyed out when you can’t unlock them but show them anyway so you can see all the genes available? There are some that require multiple pathways to meet at a point and you only know if you spend points to converge all the paths, which not everyone will do. I deducted a mark for the repeated data in the redundant Data section of the World menu. This really isn’t required...
Sound - 10/10
The sounds are good, there’s a background loop that sounds similar to the Pandemic loop track, but the addition of sound effects in the game put it above Pandemic in the sound department. Some of them are quite creepy but I guess that’s the vibe they were going for here and they nailed it!
Graphics - 10/10
The graphics for Plague Inc. are amazing, the game is bright and bold, which is why I feel the game is dumbed down and not as realistic and scientific as Pandemic. The only problem with the graphics I have is the problem with the gene pathways and also the top section of the GUI sometimes blocks out bubbles in countries such as Canada, Russia and Greenland.
The use of Landscape orientation is definitely a bonus here!
Difficulty - 7/10
The game is a lot harder than Pandemic, I’ve yet to finish this on Normal even once... This is due once again to issues with the Cure development. It seems to get to around 20% and then it just rockets up and nothing you can do can stop it. I’ve had all 8 or so of the genes to do with cure development hindrance and it seems to do nothing at all in abating the research, also popping the bubbles seems to do nothing as well? I’ve popped tens of bubbles and it’s done nothing to slow down or stop the research. It also seems that the cure always works in Plague Inc. there’s no chance of it being an unsuccessful cure like in Pandemic.
Learning Curve - 8/10
The learning curve for the game is a bit all over the place... You think you have the hang of the game then suddenly the cure arrives and everything goes downhill, or a new symptom mutates and messes up your game plan. Also the fact that you can’t see the full gene pathways makes it very hard to plan ahead unlike in pandemic, where all the genes are visible from the start of the game. Other than that the game is very easy to pick up, as new bubbles arrive you get pop ups telling you what to do, which you can turn off. I have one problem though which I can’t seem to find the answer for. In Pandemic the variables for the diseases are explained. In Plague Inc... Not so much, I have no idea what severity means, it sounds the same as lethality but it can’t be... So yeah, I don’t know.
Also it’s harder to plan ahead as you don’t get markers to show how symptoms affect your variables like in Pandemic, you just have to guess and hope your lethality doesn’t get too high.
Average Score – 9.0/10
Overall Score – 10/10
Plague Inc. has the problem of being marked with the stigma of a copycat; Pandemic is pretty much the only known pandemic simulation game and has been for a long time. Plague Inc. however does some things a lot better than Pandemic does and maybe can be seen as an entry level Pandemic game. It does look friendlier and easier to play but once you get into it, Plague Inc. is not a casual game (at least if you’re not playing on Casual anyway...) it is definitely a good contender against Pandemic, I honestly love both of these games and still play them both. They have different mechanics and game play elements so are completely different games and as such, play differently. You can’t take your strategy from Pandemic and copy it to Plague Inc. because chances are, it won’t work at all. As I said above, if I had to pick just one I would definitely pick Plague Inc. Don’t let Pandemic’s reputation as the only pandemic simulator put you off and mark Plague Inc. as just a clone.
