About Infection:
This review is based on only the tutorial and first scenario, just so all of you who are waiting can see some comments :First – no issues to complain about at all, so far. There are some ‘hints/tips’ shown during load/save screens which can flash past a little quickly but as they’re only there to give you something to look at I don’t THINK I’ve missed anything important. select a protein for each of your incubators. This is a random-draw which dictate what you’ll be able to do later in the turn. b) open the AV (doh, can’t remember what it stands for!) to see which proteins you need to destroy the remaining viral hexes, c) check the store to see if there’s any machine/person you wish to buy. d) decide which of your staff and machines you wish to use this turn, e) harvest proteins and allocate them the AV f) kill those parts of the virus that your completed AV options allow, g) end turn for random events; virus spread and mutation included. Gameplay for the first scenario is short (5 minutes) but affected by (random) mutation. In my first playthrough I needed an additional two turns thanks to a mutation that I didn’t in the second. This second playthrough was to check replayability. I’ll leave it to you to find out what does and doesn’t change, but think there’s enough that you can play each scenario several times. Graphics are as good as they need to be, but this isn’t a graphics-based game. Music wasn’t annoying enough to turn off – although that’s generally the first thing I do in any game – and effects-sounds are also acceptable if unremarkable (again, it just isn’t that sort of game, so they don’t affect gameplay). Summary – plays as a puzzle game rather than ‘hard science’ because of the protein random-draw and various references to die-rolls (which are automatic). Bear in mind that I have not yet played the later scenarios, where world-events become significant. Knowing the makeup of the virus but having a random selection of proteins seems the wrong way around to me. I’d have thought the choice of which proteins to incubate would be up to me, while trying to find a combination that was effective against a particular virus would be the hard part.
