Plague Inc: Evolved Review

Plague Inc. has been one of those games that have been on my Steam Wishlist for a while now. There's really no reason I haven't bought it until now, other than to say I'm just a tad cheap. But with my paycheck and Tax Return clearing I figured I could drop the $14.99 that it was asking. To put it simply, I'm not disappointed in my investment. I do however, feel that they could and should do more to expand the game. It's important to note that this is a Early Access game and I understand that many game elements may change or be enhanced in the future. But as of now 3/2/15, this is my review.

The Good:

Plague Inc. is a seemingly daunting task at first and doesn't provide you with a lot of info to get yourself started. But things really aren't as hard as they first seem. Your first objective is typically to infect as many people as you possibly can. But there's plenty of room to experiment here, which can be fun and challenging in its own right. The interface is pretty easy to figure out and you'll be on your way to global destruction in no time.

The game is fairly fun, it's simple- but it's fun. You spend the majority of your time clicking popups which provide you with additional 'Bonus DNA' to modify your Plague with. The biggest challenge it seems is to create a contagious plague that isn't very lethal- at least not at first. Once you've spread to all corners of the Earth it's time to ramp up the lethality and start raining chaos upon the planet. This isn't always easy, and different plague's require different tactics in the short term.

It's tough to find other things I like about this game. It's very simple at its core- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The Bad:

The problem Plague Inc. faces, is how repetitive the game becomes. The major gameplay feature you'll notice is how much clicking your doing to recover additional 'Bonus DNA', while this feature isn't bad in itself. It calls back to the game's predecessor as a Mobile Game App. In the future, I'd like to see some creative variety in obtaining additional DNA. The other issue with gameplay is a pretty key factor to the game, in playing the game close to 8 Hours last night I found myself falling back to the same strategy over and over again. Infect with a low risk plague- then ramp of the lethality at the last minute to cause a massive kill off. Once you've got the swing of this tactic- the game starts to fade and the AI becoming glaringly obvious. This could be solved however, with different objectives or extended gameplay. Perhaps in the future we'll see scenarios where you've been contracted to kill off one countries population, while protecting another- or other such complicated scenarios which would produce much more intuitive strategy.

The next issue I ran into was the additional content the game provides the player. While it appears at first beneficial to know more about the country you're infecting- in reality the majority of this information is repetitive or can simply be thrown out as useless. Worse yet, many of the buttons you are able to click don't provide any tool tips, which makes early gamers feel rather lost- I know I did. In addition, the game also allows the player to zoom in and while this may be for a future feature that involves a much more in depth look. At the moment this serves no purpose and if anything- hinders the player from spotting the Bonus DNA popups.

Summary:

In the end, despite these flaws I'm assuming there's a plan moving forward to solve these problems. According to the Plague Inc. Wiki, the developer has gone over nearly half a million gamer responses to his game, in order to improve gameplay overtime. So I'll be looking forward to see where he takes this game in the future. Final score,

6.5