The drugs don’t work… but they sell like hot cakes
Theme Hospital games have mostly avoided medicine. In fact, let’s face it, games mostly avoid difficult themes – probably because titles like the superbly depressing environmental destruction simulator Fate of the World have a tendency to not sell well. And we suspect the Democracy series only sells because the results of political and economic decisions within it are so apocalyptic. Big Pharma’s tack is more on the manufacturing side, which makes it closer to logic games such as SpaceChem. Except its focus is the drugs industry.
Here you’re a manager of a pharmaceutical firm. You start with a handful of unlocked ingredients, a couple of simple processing machines and a small amount of floorspace to work in. Then you get to work out what drugs you can make that will be profitable, that are competitive against other drugs and not packed with tons of horrible side effects.
Making those decisions is hard and expensive. The cost of ingredients and machines is high relative to the profit you’ll earn from them. Discovering new ingredients by exploring distant lands is expensive – both in the high up-front hiring costs and cheaper day-to-day expenses. Researching new machines to improve your processes is also expensive. Using the analysis machine to determine peak concentrations is expensive. And removing side effects can be terrifyingly expensive.
And the core mechanic is hard to grok. Each ingredient has positive aspects – like curing heartburn – and negative ones – like causing flatulence. Each positive aspect can be upgraded into a highervalue treatment by certain processes, and some negative aspects can be removed in the same way. Each aspect also has a concentration at which it is active, and another at which it’s at maximum strength. The best drugs will have all their positive aspects maximised, all the side effects removed and be packaged in a nice profitenhancing form.
To do that, you use your processing machines to raise and lower the concentration, connect them with belts to transfer the material, and encapsulate them as pills, creams and so on. Each factory area only has a certain number of inputs, so efficiency of design is vital.
Joyously, there are several sandbox modes that let you play the game in tons of different ways, as a well as a custom game mode. For us, the best way to play it at the start was as a custom game without competing companies, as struggling against your budget to make an effective drug was difficult enough for a beginner.
Though it’s very clean to look at, Big Pharma doesn’t have the pure elegance of Infinifactory or SpaceChem, as its puzzles are as much about generating generic problem-solving revenue. Also, the necessity for plugging conveyer belts rather than connecting machines directly everywhere is slightly forced. Finally, it also, despite its theme, doesn’t make any moral comment on the drugs industry, which is surprising.
Big Pharma is a smart game for players who love hard puzzles. The fact it’s about drugs is by-the-by, but it’s a clean-looking product that’s mentally healing, without being too addictive. – DANIEL GRILIOPOULOS