It’s an uncomfortable reminder that we really are one superbug away from catastrophe. Sitting and watching a planet that was once busy and dynamic slow to become unmoving and decaying, covered in sickly red dots, is eerie. Usually that’s when the battles and stakes hit their highest points, but here it’s really a sit-and-wait kind of experience, as there aren’t many more resources coming in to mutate the virus with, but governments are falling, so the research to find the cure is also slowing. At the start of the game there is air and sea traffic everywhere, but governments, as they become desperate, close their borders, so the planet starts to go ‘quiet.’ This is a rare strategy game where there’s not much you can do in the last third of it. One of the most chilling things to view is, in fact, what happens as critical numbers of people in nations become infected. It’s simple, but challenging, because the game does work as a plague modelling simulation, and does reflect how diseases manage to travel around the world today, and how nations co-ordinate efforts to then fight against them. It’s a simple strategy game that requires you to develop a disease that will kill people and resist efforts to cure it, with the end goal of wiping out the planet. Plague Inc, originally released on iOS, is a truly masterful game that makes the move to console effortlessly. Somehow Brazil was the last nation on the planet to have living people. Australia, insulated somewhat by its distance and geographic isolation, was second. Morocco, the last nation to be infected, was also the third last to be wiped out. America, the initial source of Trump, held on to public order for a valiant period, but as it fell, the sense that the disease would win became palpable, and the residual efforts of the likes of England, Japan and Brazil would not be enough. India, its massive population that exists in such poor health conditions, was second. Sweden was the first to fall, after a dwindling population panicked and extremists caused a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. After enough died, the government would be overthrown and the nation would no longer supply money to the research efforts. It became a race would the scientists be able to find a cure for Trump before the world’s populations collapsed? As more and more people died, order in their respective countries began slipping. At first, the funding was minimal, but as Trump began infecting more areas South Africa, India, Russia, the global effort to defeat Trump intensified, and more and more money was thrown into medical research. It was about when the first people in Europe were infected, having had the disease move to them via boat and plane, that the first death occurred, and that’s when the world’s scientists sprang into action, with government-funded medical programs designed to find a solution. This biological time bomb was about to explode. No one had died, yet, but millions were now carriers. Trump was, by now, growing in potency rapidly, to the point where the mutations were starting to make it dangerous to life. ![]() It was Mexico that was infected first, and my immediate thought was that the Mexicans should have built a wall. ![]() Trump was ready to start making people really sick. Finally, I gave it a nasty lasting power by making it resistant to antibiotics. Earning mutation points as the disease started to infect a small handful of others, I was able to increase the potency of Trump, adding coughs and skin complications, and I was able to help it spread by allowing animals to become infected with it. But the scientists were not aware of it at that point, so I had a headstart to get Trump going. It was nothing too major, and if scientists had have been looking for a cure then and there, it would have been nipped in the bud. Trump started out infecting just a few Americans, with a low-level respiratory illness. Naturally, I named my disease Donald Trump, and at first that was hilarious… until it became chilling. In Plague Inc: Evolved, you can name a disease, and your task is to have that disease wipe out the entire human population.
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