Game Experience: Low
Game Value: Low
Quiche says: I don’t know why I’m still playing this game but I am
Infection on iOS is repetitive, morbid, insensitive, and mindless. But the F2P is also extremely addictive. The objective is to create a disease, spread it, and send the 6.5 billion members of the human race into extinction. If one person survives, you lose. If a cure is found, you lose. Everyone must die.
You start by picking your ground zero country. From there, you choose various traits to inspire the virus to spread and infect as many people as possible. You then decide on the symptoms and resistance factors that will guide your lovely disease to kill. Again, the goal is to kill. Everyone must die.
The gameplay is simple. There’s a map of the world. Each country has its unique combination of characteristics: climate, wealth, urban, rural, etc. Depending on the nation’s traits, your virus may or may not be effective. For example, if your virus is more effective in colder temperatures, it will not be as effective in Africa.
You tap on a country to start and the clock starts running. The game is paused only to give you time to shape your pet virus. You accumulate DNA points for new infections and mutations and growth and lethality, which are ultimately used to add traits and develop the virus into a killer disease. You also get DNA points for popping red and yellow bubbles that appear. To infect other nations, you need transmission via airplane or ship, which are shown on the map as airplanes and ships. There are ports and airports but not all countries have ports and airports. The game continues until one of two things happen: all the people that will die are dead, or a cure is found. You get points for how fast you kill off the world.
There are various missions with different challenges as the game progresses to give it some semblance of a campaign. For example, you have to win with a virus that doesn’t do so well in wealthy nations, etc. As the challenges get tougher, the F2P business model kicks in, tempting you to spend money to win.
Here’s the basic strategy:
Infection Stage
- Start with a nation with many borders, a port and an airport.
- Transmit via water First, and then Air, and then depending on your nation’s traits, choose between rat, bug, cow or birds. You don’t really need the blood.
- Make sure to max out the transmission that will infect via ship because Greenland and Madagascar can only be reached by sea, and those two take a while for the virus to reach them.
- Spend DNA points on a few resistance traits such as Drug Resistance or cold Resistance, but don’t spend anything on Symptoms because doing so will trigger cure research, which will shorten your game, and you won’t be able to kill everyone.
- Once the disease is on a good pace, don’t spend any more DNA points. Save them. You should have at least 50 points left.
- Wait until everyone is infected.
Kill Stage
- Again, you should have saved at least 50 points here. Spend it all right away on symptoms. Start with Coughing and move up choosing the most lethal. You should have about 25% of your lethal meter filled right off the bat.
- Once your lethality and visibility is up, the world will start to research a cure, and the race is on.
- Pop blue bubbles to slow research. Add more lethality and resistance with DNA points.
- Keep up the pace and your disease will wipe out humankind.
