Reviews for Pandemic: EoM

[Parsistamon]

fun, but slightly frustrating

I enjoyed this game, however, I was frustrated by the difficulty to spread the disease. I tried many times. It is a pain to waste turns getting your infectivity up to three, and then spreading all your turns spending your meager points trying to infect more of the populace, to no avail. I probably spent at least 30 points trying to infect more of my first country. It did not work once. Other times, when by luck I would manage to get away from my country and infect other countries, I would manically attempt to infect airports. Howevr, this proved to be difficult even with the entire live population infected. When I did manage, the planes would almost go to an infected country, or even land on the same continent. Though this is realistic, it seems unlikely that the odds would be so against the virus, espescially when the playr has wasted fourteen points trying to get the infectivity up.

good game, but next time (if there is a next time) even the odds a bit

[Mathmin]

A game that has still got great potential.

Pandemic EoM is a turn based strategy of a sort. The player is given control of a bacteria strain that is suposed to wipe out the human kind.

Every turn the player is given a choice of developing his bacteria, spreading it across continents or within continents or storing up points for later use. Spreading of the disease happens by selecting the continent you want to use as your medium and allocating points to the spreading of the disease. The characteristics of your strain will determine the sucess rate of the spreading of the disease.

As most times with similar games Pandemic is really a game of luck. After figuring out the best aproach to spreading your virus all the player has to do is maintain the plan and hope that his luck won't run out at some point. Ofcourse figuring out what to do is really the fun part but once you have done that the game becomes rather monotonous.

The game as such is still quite a lot of fun -who wouldn't like wiping out humanity with a pandemic after all. Yet the lack of feedback from players actions in the game reduces the replay value and enjoyment of the game. Allthough "tactical" game play has been increased by creating a feature of a cure being created on all the continents. Sadly enough the cure rarely poses a threat to the player as the cures development is so slow that the game has probably allready ended before the cure is even close to being created. Even if the cure hapens to be finished there is a chance of the cure going wrong and all of the continents work going to waste. Ofcourse once more this is a matter of luck. I played one game where on the first turn half of the continents had reached 1/5 of the cure has been researched status.

One more problem with the game is that the effects of the improvements of the bacteria are not shown anywhere. The player doesn't have any idea of whether his increase of the infectivity has actually increased the chances of the strain spreading.

Despite all it's flaws Pandemic EoM is really a fun game to play through once. it has a huge potential of becoming a really good game
or even an MMORPG if it would be refined properly, I do recommend it to all.

*Hints/spoilers*

I've tried to avoid the most obvious conclusions but here are a couple of hints that might help you out a bit.

Using planes is probably the most efficient way of spreading the bacteria. The chances of an airport being infected seem to be correlated to the amount of (alive) infected people on the continent. so a player should infect a country he wants to spread from preferrably to such a level that one or two people aren't infected in the country and the rest are. This way if a plane happens to land on a continent that has allready been infected the plane won't go to waste because on of the uninfected people can still get infected and you have saved one skill point that way -yes a plane can leave the continent and land on the same continent if you are really unlucky.

Also a player should use planes at the start, because spreading by land to adjacent land connected continents is rather easy at the end of the game. So a player first wants to infect places like greenland and oceania so that if a cure is about to be created in those countries the player doesn't have to panick and start sending out lots of planes that just end up landing on your allready infected countries.

Allocating points to lethality is not only useless but harmful for the spreading of the disease. If the hosts keep on dying at the beginning of the game, the game becomes a bit harder.

[HalfPint93]

i liked it but

firstly the music dosnt fit what the game is about
secondly your map wasnt very acurate and was badly drawn, you even managed to completly miss off the greatest country ever, britian
thirdly it was far too confusing to be any fun, the first pandemic game was good because it was simple and you could figure out how to do it without the instructions
my advice is dont do spin-offs of popular games because they simply provide a less-fun more confusing game
i will vote 3 though because it was a nice try

[Mulrus]

Not what I wanted to see from a sequel

The original Pandemic game was very well received, and although EoM is a nice improvement in terms of being able to control the spread of the virus, I have several major gripes with it.

Firstly, it takes a step back when it comes to the graphics and music of the game. I was very impressed with the mood set by the original game, and although hovering pop-ups of info above the continents and the static-flash when entering the virus screen were not very efficient, by slowing down the gameplay, the appearance was very unique and effective. Now that these have been replaced by clearer, but much less appealing bar graphs of the population in each continent and the no-less restricting slider for selecting virus upgrades, something from the game feels to have been lost.

Most importantly, however, the game still feels very random. My virus got wiped out several times from the very first turn. Although we are informed that evolving the virus' infectivity and drug resistance increases the respective actions' chance of success, on one continent, you might have to spend 2 points to widen the amount of people infected, while on another, you can spend 12 points and still see no success. As another reviewer has said, my airplane landed in the same region, wasting the points I've spent infecting the airport.

Moreover, some features feel irrelevant due to the new game mechanics. Infecting the water source does not seem to give any tangible benefit. And I have absolutely no clue who would want to spend points on the lethality attribute of the virus. Evolving the virus already costs an extravagant amount of points past level 3, and it seems that while taking turns to collect more points to spend on spreading the virus across regions, people die off just fine on lethality level 1, maybe even too fast, considering that I want them to stay infected so that I keep on receiving more points.

Nevertheless, the original Pandemic has set a very high bar in terms of expectations from a sequel, which is a major reason why I seem to be so negative in my review. I like the fact that time was taken to try and improve on the game mechanics, and I hope that the effort will continue.

[Kt-Atis]

CNN: BREAKING NEWS Pandemic: EoM Has Arrived

That was a pretty good game. But Mexico should be added also. And Seperate China and Japan. Use countries and not continents and I think this game would be TIGHT!