Bio Inc Plague Doctor Offline

You are it! The Grim Reaper, or at least his dirty little helper. Bring bad luck, manipulate circumstances, burst some blood vessels, just get your victim to succumb before he is miraculously saved by the modern health apparatus.

Let's get this straight. Bio Inc is a fantasy game. In each game, you will be focusing on a single individual, who has some strengths and weaknesses. While he is living his days, unknowing that you want him dead, you will be able to collect bio points by tapping on bacteria and viruses as they show up in different layers of the patient's body. This is just a grinding aspect, and nothing special really.

With bio points, however, you can begin to invest in turning things from okay to bad, and further on to worse. Unlike in similar games, where you would upgrade a specific disease, here you'll be spending points into three separate categories. Diseases lets you unlock symptom trees which can compromise a patient's immune system, for example. There are eight systems into which you can invest points.

To ease the way into these diseases, you can also spend on unlocking risk factors. These range from smoking, to obesity, bad genetics, workaholism, and even bad luck. But when it comes to disease becoming very noticeable, the patient will begin medical treatment. This is terrible news for you, you'll only have time to kill Joh Doe up until the procedure is complete.

You can slow down the treatment process by investing in counter recovery measures. These can be fear of treatment, limited mobility, bad nursing, and the staff being on strike (oh, too bad).

All categories influence one another in some way. For example, you might find that the patient developed heart problems for overworking, even though you haven't invested at all in damaging the circulatory system.

Speaking of which, the disease category feels very abstracted. If you focus on destroying the man in this way, it might seem that the only cause of his disease is having had the misfortune of being worked on by an immaterial entity, and not necessarily from eating too many burgers and fries. In this way, the player represents an evil spirit more than anything else, which makes the game feel somewhat detached from the theme that's trying to convey.

Of course, while playing you will learn some limited information about how the various systems work, and how bad conditions can influence our health, but the cause-and-effect feature is only a side method that you can use, instead of being the main avenue of progression. This realization is very disappointing to me.

A second thing that bugs me with Bio Inc. is the recovery system. The only thing that you can do about it is slow it down, but once it reaches one hundrred percent, all your efforts have been in vain. The victim might be on the verge of dissintegration, with every system of his body corrupted or shut down, but if the treatment is done, then voila, perfect health is restored in an instant and you lose the game. What a bunch of baloney!

Final Thoughts

Bio Inc. Biomedical Simulator is a sort of Plague Inc. clone, that shifts the focus to a single individual, and removes the pragmatic element that made the game mentioned above so compelling. That is, Bio Inc seems to be more of a simulation of collapsing health and nothing like controlling a pathogen.