Pandemic 2 Review (PC)
By Reuptake 2 Comments
Sometimes the people around me show a smattering of concern regarding the degree that I seem to hate my fellow man. While I'll be the first to admit that I can be less Buddhist than I'd like at times, my disdain for humanity is more of a cheap hobby rather than anything that could manifest into a scenario where I justify concerns by taking to a clock tower with a sniper rifle. That said, more often than not that disdain remains, so Pandemic II was game which cheered me up immensely. The goal of Pandemic II is to create and evolve a biological contagion with the ultimate task being the utter elimination of the human race. Your first decision is what type of contagion you want to create, with your choices being a virus, bacteria, or parasite. This is important because some contagions evolve faster than others, and thus gain new abilities and symptoms at a faster rate which ties into the eventual goal of the extinction of mankind. To balance this, the faster your disease evolves, the easier it is to be detected by those pesky medical plebs.I created a bacterial cocktail of death that I named "The Black Shakes," and set it loose on Cuba where it would soon overcome the masses and give them something to think about besides poor relations with the United States. Spreading your disease is obviously a priority, and as the game progresses in real time you gain evolution points that you can spread out among a host of symptoms and attributes. Some symptoms cause your disease to spread faster, such as vomiting, but make it easier to detect by the medical community. You can also boost your contagion's resistances to environmental factors, such as heat, cold, moisture, etc., which makes it easier to spread to certain regions of the globe. You can also increase its resistance to antibiotics and medical treatment, which becomes important later.
Evolution points can also be used to allow your virus to be transmitted in different ways, such as through the air, insects, rats, and water. All of these elements come together in a truly pleasing way that gives the player a lot of options for how to destroy civilization. It's a delicate balancing act between evolving symptoms and transmission methods that spread your disease effectively, and yet not going over the top until the very end in order to avoid early detection. Eventually though, despite your best efforts, some bastard in a laboratory somewhere will make a connection between your existence and the sudden increase in slow, boil-related agonizing deaths across the world, and mankind will band together in order to create a vaccine. You can slow this progress down by evolving a high resistance to drugs, and if you've spread far and wide enough, most of the hospitals and labs will close, causing further delays in its production and implementation.Pandemic II is also a hard game. While it's pretty easy to wipe out major continents, the difficulty comes from small holdout island nations with relatively little travel such as Greenland. Obviously the more commercial airliners and ships are traveling from place to place, the faster your contagion will spread. And let me tell you, if a biological epidemic ever does break out, I'm packing my bags and moving to Madagascar, if I can even get in, because I'm convinced that Madagascar is fucking impenetrable. I'll admit I'm not the best hand at geography, but I'm pretty sure that Madagascar, while perhaps not as well traveled as Aruba, does in fact have an airport and that ships visit its port more than once a decade. For all I know the developers got it right and Madagascar really is a walled off dictatorial state with its inhabitants forbidden from having contact with the outside world in some Orwellian, North Korean act of social control, but it just feels like the developers are having a little giggle at my expense.
Nit-picking aside, Pandemic II is a fantastic strategy game with a novel concept that offers hours of "dicking around" time in front of your computer. It's not so difficult as to be a stumbling block for people who've never touched a strategy game before, but there's enough nuance and depth to challenge you and really make you think about what your game plan is. Madagascar still chafes me, but I suppose I can pretend that they represent the last holdout of humanity, and then I can swagger over there on an epic and selfless mission to repopulate the planet.Pandemic II is a creation of Crazy Monkey Games and can be played for free at their site.