Playing status: 100% achievement
Grindy Achievement(s): No.
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (215+ achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): Yes (~10 achievements).
DLC Achievement(s): Yes (18 achievements).

If you have played Pandemic[www.kongregate.com] or Pandemic 2[www.kongregate.com], you must be familiar with Plague Inc: Evolved. It's a simulation game with the same mechanic as those games, where you play as a plague to destroy the world. However, despite it offering a multiplayer mode, this review won't cover much about it.

Pros:
- 11+ plagues with different mechanics
- A lot of levels to complete
- 4 difficulties
- Multiplayer modes - both versus and co-op with different mechanics
- Workshop content for those who want more

Cons:
- Performance issues if you saved and/or loaded the game a lot of times
- Difficulty is unbalanced in some scenarios
- No ability to fast forward in versus mode

Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Yes.
If you like to play pandemic simulation games, buy this game. You also can try the free android version[play.google.com] which has fewer features if needed. Achievement hunters might find some achievements to be annoying though.

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For a simulation game, this game has a neat visual. The world map, which is mainly what you see on the screen, looks like a zoomed-out Google Earth if you zoomed it in. The visuals for the plagues also look unique from each other with their scary look. I didn't know how a plague actually looks like from a microscopic lens, but the bacteria plague looks similar to the one that I got from a Google search, so that's something.

Gameplay
The goal of this game is simple: you must use your plague to eradicate humanity. Points will be obtained as more people got infected or killed, which can be used to upgrade your plague to make it more infectious (infectivity), harder to cure (severity), or lethal (lethality). The numerous ability to upgrade will increase the number of strategies that you can take to win and allow you to find the strategy that works for you.

Surprisingly, the game can help you to remember the world map. The in-game map is 99% accurate, save for some countries that are grouped or removed due to its small size. You need to infect all countries to win, so you're bound to look for the location of the rest of the countries that you haven't infected yet.

Plagues
11 plagues are available for you to play, each with different pros and cons. Three of them also can be played differently, allowing you to create zombies, control apes, and play as a vampire. However, four of them are just too similar to each other, and the difficulty between the different ones can break the game's difficulty. Take Neurax Worm for example. It's a plague that basically can win all scenarios since it can infect people in other countries, even after they close their borders, and spread itself very quickly.

The ability description doesn't always tell you everything. Surprisingly, there are other stats that you need to pay attention to other than infectivity, severity, and lethality. Some abilities can give you an infectivity boost in certain countries, while other abilities, such as the one in Bio-Weapon, have a vague description. In Bio-Weapon's case, it has an ability that can reset its potential lethality over time, but it never states how long and how much. As someone who prefers to know the exact stats for what I bought, this puts me on edge since I couldn't tell how effective it is.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2570163104

News
Information about what happened around the globe will be delivered as you play. The ones that you will get will be random - it can be anything from something unrelated to your plague to something that can put you at risk like increasing the cure research rate, which will net you a game over if it reaches 100%. This can turn some runs into an RNG game, especially if you have to rely on a certain event to trigger if you want to aim for a certain achievement.

Multiplayer
Surprisingly, the multiplayer is still alive. It might be because the game was part of IndieGala[www.indiegala.com]'s recent bundle[www.steamgifts.com], but it's nice to see that you can find someone in versus or co-op mode even though you have to wait for a few minutes at most. I didn't try it in the versus mode, but I kept on bumping into the same people whenever I did a quick co-op match. This might also be caused by the lack of co-op content though - there is only one level that you can play after all.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2570164389

Length and Difficulty
I finished the main scenario, which is basically the introduction course to familiarize yourself with all plagues, in 5.4h. I moved to Official Scenarios afterward, which offers a modified scenario from the main game, and finished them in 12.5h. The rest of my playtime was spent in obtaining the rest of the achievements and checking out both multiplayer and DLC content.

As a game with 4 different difficulties, I finished each level in either normal or casual at first, which are two of the easiest difficulties in the game. I didn't particularly fond of the higher difficulty since they can take too long to finish due to their low infectivity rate. It feels as if I'm playing a slower version of the game, and the 3x speed that the game has to offer doesn't feel enough to kill my boredom from waiting until I get enough points to upgrade.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2570165671

Some achievements can be annoying to finish if you aim for 100% achievements though. While most of them involve triggering some event that will be almost impossible to figure out by yourself, some of them rely on RNG to beat. I had to spend over 10h just to get one of them due to the randomness, and the game glitched out as a result.

Problems
The game has issues with saving and/or loading a lot of times. There were times when I had to wait for a long time to load my save, and one occasion when the world map turns black, which then crashed the game when I reloaded another save. It all happen when I tried to get the RNG-based achievement, which shouldn't be included in the game in the first place if the game has such performance issues.

While it still gives the same feeling as the Pandemic game, it still tries to be its own game; a lot of features and levels are added to give it a replay value and uniqueness. It might feel repetitive sometimes, especially if you stick to one strategy to beat all levels, but this game wasn't meant to be played in one go, after all. It's best to be played a few times per day, although in my case, I couldn't stop playing until I got too sleepy to continue. This is one of a kind game with its unique gameplay, and I strongly suggest trying it out if you haven't played something similar already, or are in love with this kind of game.

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