Plague Inc (Android)

...with benefits

Year: 2012 -- Developer: ndemic -- Publisher: Android Marketplace

Plague Inc is a game where you play the role of a disease (or someone who controls the disease, depending on how you look at it).  The majority of the game is played just by watching a map of the world, and evolving your disease to infect and kill as many people as possible.  You win if you infect, and subsequently kill everyone in the world.  You lose if you kill all of your hosts before everyone is infected, or if the world develops a cure to you.

The beginning of each game starts you with deciding what type of disease you want to be.  At first, you can only be bacteria, then virus, then fungus, etc.  In the end, you can even control a nano-virus or a bio-weapon agent.  Each class has has its strengths and weaknesses which affect how you play each game.

After you have decided what you want to be, you pick a country to start in. Each country in the world has different stats regarding whether it's arid, humid, hot, cold, temperate, urban, rural, etc.  Also, they may have airports or seaports.  All of these are factors that you will use to determine how you can spread from country to country, and how you will infect the world.

After you have picked your country, you start by waiting.  You allow a few people to be infected, and as you do, you gain DNA points.  These points are spent to evolve your disease.  You may decide to boost your strength in hot countries, if you start near the equator. You may boost your water transmission if you need to get into a country that has a seaport, or is humid in general.  You can also spend points into abilities that slow down the progress made towards the curing of you.

As you infect more and more people, it spreads around the world.  If you find you aren't hitting certain areas, you can look at the information about hose countries and decide if you need to evolve to move that direction.  As you infect more, you can start to increase the amount and severity of your symptoms, ranging from coughing to sneezing to insanity to organ failure.  Some of these symptoms increase transmission, some cause death and some can delay the cure.

While you are developing, the game is pumping news at you, some of it regarding events that may cause you to rethink your strategy, or sometimes it's just humorous or interesting tidbits.

It's so awesome watching the world as it becomes infected with your disease!

Just one of the leveling screens, and even then, you can't see half of the stuff you can evolve from here!

What keeps me coming back to this game is that it plays well in short bursts, but also as a whole game, when played well, it only takes about 30 minutes to dominate the world.  It's that feeling of power that you are in control of this disease, and when you hit that awesome combo of transmission and symptoms and you just watch the Infected People skyrocket.  Then, as soon as you infect everyone in the world (6.8 billion people), you bump up the lethality, and you watch the number drop right back down.

All the while, you are trying to balance staying "weak" enough that you don't scare the world into finding a cure super quick.  Also trying to work around the fact that richer countries have access to better medicine in the first place.  As the world starts to work on a cure, do you try to kill those countries so they can't work on it?  Or do you spend your points in becoming more complex, causing them to work longer on curing you.

With all of the classes, the transmissions, the countries, the symptoms and the special abilities, there are several way to play each level, and it's fun just seeing what combos pop up as you progress.  The "oops" combo is triggered when you evolve to include sneezing and diarrhea!  Also, you can bump insanity and cause countries to nuke each other!  There is just such variety that it's hard to play the same game twice.  And even when you lose, you're left thinking "Man, I could have just tried this or tried that and I totally would have won".

Considering I don't have a lot of time to play, I have somehow found quite a bit of time to play this.  It's usually staying up too late, playing it bed to just try "one more time" to beat that level.   One thing I have found about this game is that even though there isn't a story build into it, you are left feeling like you just went on a huge journey and you can't wait to tell everyone about the story you created.  Often, my girlfriend and I will be playing at the same time, and when we are done, we just can't stop talking about what happened, and retelling the history of our disease.

I am definitely going to keep calling this one up for a while.. I just hope I don't catch something myself ;)