Developer: Dry Gin Studios
Publisher: Dry Gin Studios
Platform: iOS, Android
Bio Inc. – Review
These days, they’re making simulation games about almost anything. There are also lots of games where you kill people. In Bio Inc you do both. This RTS biological simulation will have you work to kill a person (which you can ironically also give a name) by developing a disease. Have you got what it takes to creating the ultimate illness?
Story
Bio Inc hasn’t got a grand plot or story. However you are able to unlock more people to “kill” and each of them has a little history on them. Don’t expect much though as it won’t go much further than “A young and healthy person.” or “Victim is abnormally anxious about his health.”.
Sound
The game actually features quite a nice soundtrack. It’s a nice blend between a hospital series’ intro tune and some sort of slow deep house mix. Tapping the various buttons on the screen gives a nice response in the form of a sound effect which makes the whole experience feel more responsive. After doing enough damage, you’ll hear the victim cry out in pain from time to time. When reaching a critical state, you’ll hear a quick heartbeat adding both tension and excitement. Viruses popping up will also trigger a sound as well as collecting them. Sound however is not vital to this game. While it does add to the experience, you can play perfectly fine without it.
Graphics
Dry Gin Studios did a great job on the game’s user interface. It’s intuitive and easy to master. On the left of your screen you’ll get an overview of all your victim’s body systems. The center and right part of the screen is filled with a representation of him. Selecting a certain system causes the representation of the body to change to actually show that specific system. Damaging one of them will cause some damage to show visually as well.
Gameplay
As you probably already figured, the goal of the game is to kill a person. You do that by developing an illness. You develop that illness by gathering bacteria which pop up on the victim over time. The game will notify you of which system has one of those and then it’s up to you to tap that system and then look for it on the body before it disappears. On collection, they grant you Bio Points which are the game’s resource to develop your disease. The way you do that is through three main categories: Diseases, Risk Factors and Recovery.
The diseases system is pretty straightforward. For each system in the human body, there’s a development tree. Each step in the tree has specific effects. Those effects will cause the health of certain systems to slowly start declining. Your goal is to get them all to zero. Besides the ordinary systems, you also can choose to attack the immune system which will cause more bacteria to spawn thus generating you more Bio Points. The second system is Risk Factors. While early on, victims already have quite a bit of those, you can spend points to unlock more factors. They will cause specific systems to decline faster when attacking them. Such risks include: over 60 years old, overweight, smoker, afraid of the doctor and more. The last system, recovery, is quite an interesting one. It allows you to spend points to buy you some more time. As the patient gets sicker, he will go to the doctor and eventually check in to an hospital. You can cause for quite the disturbance: get your victim’s medication swapped with placebos, cause a strike among the nurses or make sure the doctors are too busy.
All these systems combined cause for some interesting gameplay mechanics and possible player choices. You can start by making sure the patient isn’t keen on going to a doctor before you start developing the disease or build down his immune system completely. You can also choose to just ignore those things, save up some Bio Points and then hit hard with some pretty cruel illnesses. However I did find that once you get that one tactic that works, it kind of works on most of the victims. I did have some hours of fun playing Bio Inc but don’t really feel a need to return to it anymore. I hope that the developer takes a similar approach as Plague Inc’s developers have and just provide tons of extra content to the game to keep it alive. Otherwise the game is still pretty solid as it, al be it with limited replay value.
Conclusion
Bio Inc is an enjoyable game, great to pass the time when waiting somewhere. Thanks to its intuitive UI it’s quite easy to get into and playing around with the different systems and diseases might learn you a thing or two about the human body. It does get quite repetitive after a while meaning the continued success of this game will depend on future updates to spice things up. While it’s quite different from Plague Inc on most levels, the title is very misleading. People who see this in the app store will tend to think it’s some sort of successor. A slick marketing trick but truly the game can stand on its own.
Bio Inc. - Review,
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