Pandemic 2 is the hot new game on Kongregate.com (among other gaming websites). Everyone’s playing it, talking in the chat rooms about what countries they’ve infected, how quickly they’re spreading, and what obscene/juvenile names they’ve come up with for their diseases. It even has 4 badge challenges (including a rare impossible-level one) and a card challenge. It also happens to be a terrible game.

For those who don’t know, Pandemic 2 casts the player as the newest scourge of mankind. The player first chooses to be either a virus, a bacterium, or a parasite, then starts with the disease infecting someone in a random country/area on a Risk-style map. From that point on, the player earns evolution points over time and selects what attributes (resistances, transmission methods, and symptoms) to evolve. Your disease has 3 quantifiable stats: infectiousness, lethality, and visibility. The goal is be to be highly infectious and lethal while maintaining low visibility so no one shuts down their airports or tries to develop a vaccine.

It sounds like a cool concept; in fact, it is a cool concept. I actually love viral-growth gameplay, and I really wanted to love this game. Sadly, the devil in the details, and in this case the devil is working overtime. First off, from a gameplay perspective, even if the game worked perfectly (and good God, it’s far from that), it still would have problems – most specifically that you have little control over the outcome of the game. The only, and I mean only, way you can interact with the game is by selecting which traits to evolve. Your actions have some small effect on what happens, but ultimately you end up spending most of your time just sitting there and waiting, doing nothing (on that note, I cannot conceive of playing this game on anything but the fastest speed setting). In short, I’d call it a slightly interactive lava lamp, only less interesting to watch.

This might be tolerable if we had some sort of cool, realistic simulation going on that was in any way compelling to watch unfold. Instead, we find the game logic to be self-contradictory and absurd. I’ve seen countries close airports when they didn’t have one in the first place. A hospital stayed open and continued to develop a vaccine despite the entire country being dead. I can buy “Waterborne” transmission without any Moisture resistance, despite the game specifically telling me I need Level II Moisture Resistance. People start closing ports and borders even when the disease visibility is at 0, which makes you wonder what the point of the visibility is anyway. I’ve even seen governments begin to burn bodies to reduce contamination even though no one had died yet. As a simulation it has some very serious logical issues, and considering the simulation is pretty much the only interesting thing about the game that’s a very, very big problem (as a side note, I found an excellent list of Pandemic 2 ridiculousness in a Kongregate.com forum).

On top of all that, the game is so opaque to the player that what little interaction you have in many cases seems irrelevant. Part of me honestly believes that the game just plays itself and ignores anything that you do (outside of getting your first deadly symptom). How precisely do the heat/cold/moisture resistances help you, and why can’t we know exactly which countries have which attributes (yes, the game guide lists some of them, but is that a complete list)? Do you need moisture resistance to travel on boats? What’s the difference between airborne and waterborne pathogens? What about insect vs. rodent? These are but a few of the questions that I have yet to figure out. Many of these issues lead to one very important question: what’s the point? Why are we simulating natural disasters? I can’t plan for them and certainly can’t react to them. Why do I care if a country has started to burn bodies? It’s not like I can target particular countries anyway, or do anything about it. Why am I choosing my resistances when it seems that all of the countries get infected almost simultaneously anyway?

The game ends up being an exercise in frustration, boredom, confusion, and tedium. What’s worse is that it had so much potential, making the let down all the harsher. It does have some decent visuals (though a fade-to-black as the population died would have been cool and useful) and a perfectly functional interface – but that’s about the only positive thing I can say for it. Frankly, the only reason anyone is playing this game is because of the subject matter.

Yes, it is somewhat fun and compelling concept (how sick is this?) to be able to infect and kill off the entire world. If it weren’t for that fact, and the irresistable ability to name your virus after your high school English teacher, no one would even have given this piece of trash a second look. It’s hardly interactive, heavily based on luck, far too opaque, in desperate need of commas (I’m told I’ve infected 1942578913 people…would it really have been so hard to format it like 1,942,578,913?), and is fundamentally broken. Oh, and Madagascar can burn in Hell.