In Bio Inc. – Biomedical Plague, Disease Is Your Weapon And Patients Are The Enemy

After 20 minutes of playing Bio Inc., I feel like a horrible, horrible person. Poor John Smith was already overweight, a chronic fast food eater, and a compulsive smoker, and I went out of my way to target his respiratory system. I gave him lung cancer. I gave him bronchitis. And when his doctors realized something was wrong, I went after his ticker and gave him angina, then a full-on heart attack. But that’s kind of the point of Bio Inc.: you are everything medically wrong with the world, and it’s you’re job to kill the patient by any means necessary.

  

To achieve this you collect “bio points,” which the game labels as viruses and bacteria, but which are really just randomly spawning collectibles. Accumulate a few and you can give your patient some rather typical ailments, like chronic stress or a particularly bad flu. Get a few more and you can inflict some major illness, lowering the effectiveness of a particular body system. You can unlock more powerful diseases and conditions with more bio points, or sabotage your patient with risk factors like overeating, hereditary weaknesses, or just plain bad luck. You have to keep up you attack on a variety of fronts – even with total nervous system failure or a heart attack, those pesky doctors and nurses can keep a patient alive.

Bio Inc. goes out of its way to present the player with real diseases and risk factors, or at least as “real” as they get in gaming terms – I recognized pretty much everything in there from my EMT training. The screenshots might remind you of Plague Inc., but that’s not really a fair comparison – in this game you’re going after a single person, and the surprisingly personal attack makes it oddly disturbing. After all, everyone likes to play the world-conquering villain on occasion, but killing a single (simulated) human being with real disease is… creepy. I think the worst part is the little painful grunts and wheezes the patient responds with on occasion.

Bio Inc. – Biomedical Plague is a free download, and a single $1 in-app purchase removes advertising. There are no energy schemes or in-app currencies, just a series of increasingly difficult “levels” ranging from gadget blogger overweight layabout to Artem Russakovskii immortal superman.