Right now, Plague Inc. is still a working progress and not officially released yet. However, it is already incredibly addictive.
At the start you can only choose a bacteria. You choose a country where you want the first person to get sick and off you go. Your main screen is the map of the world with swirly clouds and flying airplanes and boats going everywhere. You don't control who gets infected, but you can control how fast and by what means it spreads, how resistant it is to common anitbiotics, what symptoms people get, what type of climates are more sensitive to infection, what type of economy or urban/rural environments are more susceptible etc. You do this by spending DNA points which you receive by infecting more people, other countries, popping orange DNA bubbles or killing off loads of people.
Seems easy right? NOPE! Humans inevitably discover the bacteria which is causing the illness and will start rapidly researching cures, closing borders and airports and even dropping bombs (!!!) on highly infected areas to prevent the disease from spreading any further. You can try to slow this research down by popping research bubbles, heavily mutating the DNA of your bacteria or making it impossible to grow the bacteria in a lab environment.
The goal of the game is to kill every last person on earth before the cure has been found and spread around the world. This can be quite a challenge. DNA points are limited and if your bacteria doesn't kill people faster than the research to get the cure is conducted; you will lose the game.
It's a lot of fun to try and figure out strategies that will make the bacteria spread all over the world (you will curse those pesky places like Greenland and Iceland which can be really hard to infect), yet kill everyone off at such a rate that it's faster than research, but slow enough to infect people before everyone that has it is already dead.
Everytime you manage to destroy humanity, you get certain "upgrades" depending on what difficulty level you were playing. This means you could get more DNA points from the start, make the bacteria harder to cure from the get go and so on. At higher difficulty levels your infection will become easier to detect, easier to cure and harder to spread. Eventually you unlock virusses, worms, fungi and lots more. Each has their own special abilities. Virusses tend to mutate into certain symptoms randomly, making it easier to expose the infection and cost more and more points to devolve the symptoms away to where the infection will remain undetected. Parasites can take a airplane to wherever you want them to go because your infections makes people act weird.
There are hours and hours of gameplay and a high replay value here. You keep wanting to go back and try a different strategy or a different starting country this time to see what happens. As the map of the world gets more and more darkred in colour you smile viciously and think: "ohh, what evil mutation shall I develop next?"
You should buy this game if:
You like to strategize. Even if you are no good at it. The easy difficuly level is not very punishing, but still tricky at first. You just need to get the hang of it and test out a few things the first times around. After about three-four failed attempts, you will probably succeed in destroying humanity.
Also buy it if you have a grudge against humanity and like to be evil and cruel.
Don't buy if:
You like pretty graphics and watching people die. There are no actual images of people dying or being sick. It's a top down view of the world map with red dots that spread.
Also don't buy it if you are someone who gives up a game easily if you can't plough through it in the beginning. It takes a few tries to get the hang of it. Eventhough I believe a tutorial is planned for the final release.
What I like about this game:
- Very addictive
- New types of infection keeps things fresh and challenging
- High replay value, yet cheap on Steam now (early acces only 13 euro's)
- Shows promising developments for the actual release with new modes and even one where you can create a scenario yourself. (not available yet)
What I don't like about this game:
- Popping bubbles gets a little annoying, eventhough you eventually unlock the ability to pop them automatically, choosing that option means less DNA points because it takes up a slot which could otherwise be used for bonus DNA.
- News pop-ups are too frequent. Especially in the beginning. Some are soo unrelated and stupid that I just click them away without even reading them.
- Openly advertises during the game. Urges you to share progress on social media and buy the Plague App.