I’m taking the reins for this week’s rapid-fire review by being morbid for the current time. Yes, we are checking out a game about spreading diseases across the planet while a disease spreads across the planet. No, I don’t think I’m a complete arse, just mostly one.

Plague Inc has been out for so long now that I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought reviewing this game now would be entertaining to see the reaction. So, let’s see how good the game is and if I can do a better job than COVID-19.

Graphics & Sound:

The menu looks like it was borrowed from a Resident Evil game. It is slick, looks good and matches the theme of the game. In-game the graphics aren’t as slick, it’s just a map of the planet with boats and planes flying around. No ground units are shown except for markers to display ports and airports. As a country gets infected, it gets red dots at the infected locations. Infected ships and planes are red and they make red lines behind them as they travel (the dots and lines change to other colours for special diseases). The creativity in the graphics is astonishing (that’s sarcasm kids!).

The sound is made up of a nice soft instrumental tone that is occasionally overlapped by children laughing, sounds of engines, sirens, coughs, sneezes, etc. There are also pop-ups to click on while playing, all of them make a different sound but nothing remarkable. Finally, there is a sound for selecting menu items which never changes, all the menu items sound the same even though they do different things. Except for the music all the sound in the game feels like it was put together in a hurry.

Gameplay:

Since the sound and graphics aren’t doing well, let’s hope the gameplay has a saving grace.

The objective of the game is to infect and kill all humans on Earth. To accomplish this, you are given your choice of pathogens like bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc or you can use two special diseases including a Planet of the Apes tie in. Each of them has its pros and cons but when you first start you only get bacteria and the specials. You unlock the others by beating the game with the previous pathogen on normal difficulty. As a result of this, the other pathogens are a second stage of difficulty.

Once you pick your pathogen you have to pick a starting country. When picking a country, you should select a country with connections to other countries by all means of travel or you can go my way and pick on Greenland for getting through COVID-19 already (seriously though, they should be congratulated). Once you have chosen a country you start generating DNA points by the infection spreading along with popping icons that are shown on screen.

DNA points are the core of the game. When the game starts your pathogen is weak, not infectious and is hardly more than a mild cough. You upgrade its ability to survive, spread and its symptoms using DNA points. Each time you buy an upgrade to your pathogen in a class the cost of all other upgrades in that class goes up. This gives the game a tactical edge since you need to think of which upgrade to save up for, and be ready to switch at any given second. For the start you want to infect as many people as you can without causing panic and then start adding symptoms that kill. The problem; once a majority of the population is infected DNA points don’t grow as rapidly so it’s a balancing act of improving infection rates but at the same time keeping a steady growth of symptoms.

A lot of the upgrades have ladders resulting in first the purchase of a lower-tier upgrade then unlocking and buying a higher tier. This is where I encountered my first grievance with the game: You don’t know the next upgrade so it could be useful or quite useless unless you memorize which upgrade unlocks what and that shouldn’t be in a game… EVER!

My second grievance is how little there is to do when point generation is slow. There are the occasional news articles but that is not enough to keep you entertained. Thankfully in an attempt to fix this the developers have added 3-speed modes so you can fast forward.

Once countries start trying to tackle your disease you need to fight back. You can do this by getting symptoms that make people suspicious, tired, too weak to work or just dead. You can also do things like changing the makeup of your DNA structure to cause more work. The problem is that these are all DNA upgrades too so it’s just another trip to the upgrade screen.

The game attempts to make you play again by giving genes that you can add before the start of the next game, but it isn’t enough to make you play over and over. The game is highly repetitive with little variation on each playthrough.

Conclusion:

Plague Inc is fun at short bursts and should be played alongside something else. Each round isn’t short so you can’t pick it up while you wait for someone and it isn’t fun enough to just sit and play 10 rounds back to back.