Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had seen Plague Inc. in my Amazon recommendations for a while. I was a bit skeptical about purchasing the app for $0.99, since from the description and some of the reviews I knew the goal of the game was to wipe out all of humanity with a virus. I didn't think a game with such a creepy goal would be fun at all. However, when I was purchasing a few apps, I decided to go ahead and give this game a try for $0.99, and I am definitely glad I did. This game has to be the best $0.99 I have spent on app purchases. Even though the goal may be creepy, what makes this game fun is the strategy involved. You begin by infecting a country with your virus, and as it spreads and infects more people, you get "DNA points", which you can use to "evolve" your virus (giving it different abilities, like being resistent to antibioitics (under an "Abilities" tab), being able to spread through livestock or water (under a "Transmission" tab), or having a coughing or coma symptom (under a "Symptoms" tab)). You can also devolve the abilities, but you only get 2 DNA points back, even on something you spent over 30 points to get. You'll get DNA points by clicking on red and orange bubbles that randomly pop up, and also sometimes you will just randomly accumulate DNA points, though the faster people are infected the faster you get DNA points. Once your virus infects more people, humans will discover it and will eventually start working on a cure. Once a cure is found, the virus is usually quickly wiped out. Also, once a cure starts being worked on, blue cure bubbles (similar to the red and orange DNA point bubbles) will begin popping up, and if you click on them you can slow the cure. Some abilities you can give your virus will also help slow the cure. There are also random, ficitious news feeds that pop up that are fun to read (though after you play a few games they get old because the same ones tend to keep coming up). While the game may seem simple, there is a lot of strategy involved, because you have to imagine what would happen in real life. For example, if you make your virus really deadly to begin with, humans will find it scary and work harder to eradicate it sooner. Also, you can make your virus so deadly that it will kill all its carriers before it has time to infect everyone, making you also lose the game. On the other hand, if you don't make it deadly, humans will die more slowly and have more time to come up with the cure. Thus, a lot of strategy is involved in trying to wipe out humans with a virus because you need to try to find abilities that will slow down people from making a cure, but also make sure it doesn't kill all its carriers too quickly. This can be challenging because some of the abilities that slow down the cure also are deadly (such as the coma symptom). Also, at the end you can look at graphs showing how lethal your virus became over time, cure requirements, etc, and this is another cool part about the game. I highly recommend this app to anyone who has a dollar to spare and is looking for a fun game to play, especially to someone who enjoys strategy games.