I gave myself a few hours of game time recently and decided to load up some Plague Inc. It's one of my favorite "jump right in" strategy games to play when I don't have much time. At the time of post, I have around 50 hours of quick gameplay and have collected a mere 61 of 229 achievements. It has been a while since I've played and it looks like some things have changed.
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Right away I noticed there were some new options on the loading screen. It looks like we now have the option to load Official AND Custom scenarios that are player/community made! Clicking into the custom scenario options, we can right away that there are a ton of new ways to play. The first one I clicked on was appropriately named, "Alien Hive Mind".
While these look pretty neat, including whatever that "Pokemon Go" mode is (oh my), I think we'll stick to the main game while we get back into the swing of things.
The last virus I remember playing was the Simian Flu, which I would love to do a write-up on at some point as I think that was one of the most fun modes they've introduced as core gameplay thus far. Maybe we'll do something for that sometime in the future! Today, we're going to check out the newest member of the viral family, the Shadow Plague. Shadow Plague is essentially a vampiric plague with some new gameplay dynamics where you not only play a vampire who is infecting/converting/killing the world population, but also creating more vampires that you can play in order to fight the human forces that pop up around the world in resistance to your dark order.
Traits are:
- Sentient
- Mutagenic Pathogen
- Triggers a powerful thirst for blood!
I have a few perks already unlocked from previous play-through runs with the other pathogens, so fortunately I can go ahead and add a few boosts to what I can only imagine is going to be a brutal attempt at learning this mode. These are the boosts I went with out of the choices I did have available:
Teracyte
- Increases chance of plague spreading by land
Extremophile
- Grants a minor boost to all environmental conditions
I'm not very confident in my ability to play this mode, so I'm going to go ahead and keep the mode on Normal for now.
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The name of our plague shall be: Hivus Exterminus. I decided to go with New Zealand alllll the way down in the bottom-right of the map. My likely terrible terrible is to spread from this corner as in the past I've had trouble reaching this corner before the fortifications were in place, such as what happened in my Ape playthrough. I'm really not sure if this is going to wise or not, but we're going to find out.
For glory and for darkness!
Or .... something like that.
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It looks like the traits for this run are pretty straight forward.
- Upgrade your ability to infect.
- Upgrade your ability to cover distances.
- Upgrade your ability to heal/fight.
- Upgrade your resistance levels.
The initial transmutations are pretty standard and allow for some basic infection improvements, but they all come with a cost of discoverability. I'm going to focus on trying to stay under the radar while we creep out and infect the world! I'm going to dump all of my point into infection rates and the ability to cover ground. It looks like these infections cause carriers to form bruises all over their bodies while the vampiric plague takes hold.
Let's how this works out!
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While it did boost my Infectivity, I took on a bit of Severity too. This seemed to be forced as the first unlock raises it immediately, but is also required to begin the infection process.
No worries, let's get this party started!
Here is a quick 1 minute sped up version of the game and the outcome! Go easy on me!
