Pandemic 2: Part 2

Gameplay

When I first started the game I chose the Realistic Mode and picked the Bacteria class and named it Viking Berserker Rage. My disease was first placed in the United States and I decided to spend my evolution points on first tier of resistances, hoping that it would spread to countries outside the US with a different climate. My only symptom and source of transmission was coughing so it took some time before I had enough evolution points to upgrade/evolve my disease. Luckily the game has a fast forward button that speeds up this process. After upgrading my once more my disease finally spread from the United States and was first spotted in Canada and Mexico, then moving on to Indonesia and China. Unfortunately my disease was starting to gain attention and several countries decided to close down borders and airports making it impossible to spread to those countries. After 51 days the healthy countries decide to start developing a vaccine that can kill my disease. Meanwhile the majority of the world was trying to fight off my disease and only six countries remained uninfected: North Africa, Madagascar, Middle East, New Zealand, Greenland, and Cuba. These countries manage to deploy the vaccine but it doesn’t work as expected. The disease slowly takes over and kills of the majority of the world, however, the remaining countries outlast my disease and I finish the game without winning.

Thoughts:

The game will frustrate many, especially the first time playing, as the difficulty is very hard. Although this may turn off some players it also leads to an addictive need for wanting to complete the game. It can take many tries and you may never succeed. By having countries such as Madagascar and Greenland that are only accessible for your disease through ships and who are among the first countries to close their borders makes this game challenging. The wide variety of different evolutions and the way you can use your points in many ways makes the game seem non-redundant.

There are however some issues with the game. For example Madagascar and Greenland are very hard to infect. As soon as you can see that these countries have closed the border you already know that you aren’t going to win. This is frustrating when you’ve spent a lot of time trying to infect these regions and there seems to be no point in finishing the game.

Although getting evolution points shouldn’t be easy or fast, waiting to get those last few points in order to just upgrade one thing does not add to the enjoyment of the game.

Diseases that aren’t lethal in any way still cause the majority of the world to close down all public transportation and handing out bottled water. A simple virus that causes coughing and sneezing shouldn’t result in a mass panic around the world.