Plague, Inc - Evolved Edition

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IamLEAM1983
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Plague, Inc - Evolved Edition

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Strategy games are a dime a dozen, and it's easy to narrow down their usual mechanics. You spend your time trying to out-think your opponent. If you're lucky enough to not have to do that, then you have to overpower said opponent. We make a big show out of games sometimes requiring you to flank an unaware antagonist, to compensate for its strengths while capitalizing on its weaknesses – but we're generally treated to the almighty Zerg Rush. You push a relentless amount of low-level goons forward and win by sheer attrition, usually to the tune of you typing “KEKEKEKEKE” to further shame your rival.

Bacteria don't gloat. Viruses don't cheese their way around tactics. None of the killer micro-organisms of the past are alive in the sense in which we'd understand humans and animals to be alive; they don't bother with complex shit like homeostasis and self-preservation. There's a reason why we named our computing goblins viruses and not, you know, weaponized malicious code strings or something equally long and needlessly complex. The imagery of the virus gets the point across. It's something that's maddeningly simple in relation to our organic makeup, and that slowly and steadily learns to work around our best defenses. H1N1 was a great example of that, as is, obviously, AIDS. Immune suppression is a pretty difficult thing to engineer, and these microscopic little critters slowly and steadily crept towards that, taking most of the world by surprise in the seventies and eighties.

Running a game of Plague, Inc in its PC-friendly Evolved Edition, you have to think like a plague-spreading agent – that is, if a plague-spreading agent could think. You have to outperform the world's physicians as they scramble for a cure and, ultimately, you have to wipe out the human race.

Plague, Inc immediately brings images from Steven Soderbergh's Contagion to mind. You start by selecting a country from a fairly detailed and geopolitically realistic world map, and this country's wealth and medical expertise will inform your starting traits. Start in the United States, and you'll be outfitted with a few starting resistances to common antibiotics, as well as a general makeup that's made for temperate countries with high wealth. Start in India, and you'll be given less antibiotic resistances, in exchange for an affinity for hot climates. The country's high population density is also sure to help with your initial dispersal. With the US' rural areas, it'd be trickier for you to expand as efficiently, despite the presence of the super-developed American transport network. On a day-to-day basis, sheer, simple human contact is how you want to start.

The game then rewards you with DNA points over time, and as periodic bubbles that appear on the map. These represent new infection sites, and clicking them nets you extra points. As required, you can leave the Map screen and enter the Evolution menu, where you're presented with several paths in which to specialize your pathogen. Invest in Infection to increase the rate at which you'll spread, and in what ways you'll expand. The Symptoms menu ultimately allows you to control just how lethal your agent is, and how that lethality is expressed. You'll start out as only a little set of flu-like symptoms, like coughing, sneezing or serious rashes; but you'll quickly be able to expand into more comprehensive effects that can sometimes combine in useful ways. Coughs and vomiting spells can combine into Projectile Vomiting (mmm, tasty!), which obviously increases your infection rate. Finally, the Abilities menu contains the genetic options that are geared towards making your strand more complex or more resistant to standard forms of treatment. A more complex DNA helix means that medical research will unfold at a slower rate, and adding further resistances to complex antibiotics or extreme climate conditions will do the same.

At first, the game is quite happy to let you spec out as either a largely morbid or infectious bug; but the more people you'll infect, the more the world's governments will be concerned. In relatively short order, your host country will begin to work on a cure. As epidemiologists travel around the world in their little blue airplanes and boats, knowledge of the cure begins to spread. Like the Infection bubbles, the Cure bubbles can be burst by clicking on them. You never entirely halt progress on research against your pathogen by clicking on them, but you strongly slow down their progress. The more complex you'll become and the more offshoots you'll create, the more work will be required to eradicate you.

After losing a few games, you'll realize that Plague, Inc wants you to walk a very precise tightrope. You have to be infectious enough to survive, but never so lethal as to fully mobilize the world's medical talent. If airports are closed, you have to develop your resistances and abilities in consequence, so that even attempts to sterilize aircraft become insufficient. Economic disasters or sociopolitical events can momentarily close off portions of the globe for you, also requiring further adaptation if you're looking to keep going. Killing the scientists working on a cure for your plague might be your ultimate goal, but dying epidemiologists tend to increase government awareness and general panic. Killing unaware sheep is far, far easier than a world populace that's doubling on everything it has in its medicine bag in order to survive. This becomes a game of patience and timing, as well as of playing cat-and-mouse with motivated researchers from around the globe.

If you fail to kill all scientists or all of the previously cured citizens, the game ends. Even if it does – which it surely will for your first few rounds – Plague, Inc is an immensely entertaining and educational experience. Watching the world map go from a placid satellite photo palette to blood-red swaths engulfing entire continents is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. As the game ends and the death toll climbs to the billions, entire regions of the world are blackened away, safe, usually for a little pocket of land where the last remaining scientists have managed to hole up and keep working. It's an apocalypse of the cold, clinical and unfeeling kind, with the game being very happy to remind you that your custom decimator has surpassed Tuberculosis, the Black Death or the common cold.

This is exactly where you can understand in what way contagion mechanics function. Modelling yourself after the common cold only takes a few educated guesses, and the results are a highly infectious disease with a thankfully low mortality rate. The wintertime sniffles fail as great equalizers and levellers of entire cities, but they're a great and concrete example of how to spread your blight across the land at very little cost. There's a lot of options available, usually enough to replicate any virus whatsoever that's been known to have threatened Mankind at some point.

If anything, and considering how realistic most of the presentation and systems are, it's in your pathogen's evolution that you'll start seeing signs of “gamified” medical notions. The Symptoms tree isn't always consistently unfolding, and you can tell that a lot of the presented issues have no real connection with one another. Similarly, the game implies, thanks to its structure, that wholesale genetic re-shuffling can happen to a virus in less than 24 hours!

Granted, these silent killers are fast. They're just not that fast, I'm sorry.

Still, these are minor problems in the face of a challenging offering. Each type of plague is unlocked sequentially, with the very last two being something of a Freestyle interpretation on the game. Serious epidemiological models are thrown out the window with the Neurax worm, which spreads through mind control and comes with its own set of upgrade trees. The Necroa virus works as its name suggests, and starts as a base-line Romero Zombie Universe simulator. Later upgrades can allow you to tweak the nature of your Walkers in the same way you tweaked your more serious pathogens' abilities and traits, switching things up to Return of the Living Dead's sentient, albeit brain-loving monstrosities, or 28 Days Later and its horde of biologically maintained and cognitively deteriorated Fast Zombies.

Through it all, you'll see just how your destructive micro-organism of choice spreads around the globe. If you play your cards right, you'll kill the very last scientist alive while eradicating the human race.

This, however, is a hard game. Even at its most casual difficulty level, Plague Inc feels understandably forced to model a world in which the doctors are actually doing their damn job. Even at the Casual level's oodles of freely offered DNA points, you'll find that the World Health Organization springs to life very early on, sometimes well before you've even begun to leave your country of origin. You'll have to adapt and evolve, and you'll have to do it fast.

As I'm writing this, the Crimson Spirit has lost the battle for survival in Australia – the last bastion of a healthy humanity as of 2028. The cure was unleashed just as the world celebrated its new year with less than thirty thousand people alive and well on the planet, and I'm watching a blue wave of medical progress stamp out my meticulously prepared and coma-inducing critter. The game tosses ten DNA points my way in an almost grudging fashion, and I have to scoff. Where could I possibly invest them if I've already been beaten? Not expecting this to work, I've slotted them into Cattle Transmission.

Much to my surprise, the deployment of the cure is imperceptibly slowed down. Russia, my initial foyer, stays red for a few short seconds longer. A few days in the game's time. Then, like Reverse Smallpox, my infection sectors disappear one by one. Russia turns to a spotty red, then an honest pink. Then, the Balkans are entirely cleared as the game's news ticker informs me that the Balkans have been cleared of infection.

I've lost, for the sixth time in a row, but I've killed just under seven billion people in one year and two months.

Not bad, for a blip in someone's microscope.
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