You may remember Plague Inc. from a couple of years ago, when it popped up in form of a very infectious strategy game on people’s phones. Evolved lets you wreak havoc and buboes in greater definition and with more flair than ever before. It’s especially impressive when you consider that Ndemic Creations, the developer of the entire thing, is just one man.
The premise of Plague Inc: Evolved is as simple as ever: you’re a disease, and your goal is to infect and kill everyone on the entire planet. If you actually stop to think about it it’s incredibly bleak, but it’s executed with such skill and attention to detail that you don’t – you scheme, theorise, and try to predict global responses, whilst ignoring the news ticker that tells you Canada’s government has fallen. It makes a change from playing as the civilised government in question in a common strategy game.
Instead you pick one of several plague types to play as and a starting country for your patient zero, evolving towards a range of different abilities and symptoms. Each of these is geared towards different habitats and communities. When occurring in certain combinations they get you some creatively titled achievements – insanity and diarrhea together unlocked one called Brown Streets, for example – but they also affect the core stats: infectivity, severity and lethality.
It becomes a delicate balancing act. On one side, you: the very embodiment of illness itself. On the other, the ranged governments of the world, who have a necessarily vested interest in preventing the eradication of the human race. If you push one of your stats at the wrong time then victory will slip from your grasp. Ramping up lethality too soon will lead to early detection and closing of borders. Leave it too late and you could see yourself cured before your end goal of universal death. (see what we meant about it being bleak?).
