Big Pharma (2015)

Big Pharma is a lovely game about optimizing pharmaceutical production lines. I know that sounds hella boring, but you're wrong about that! There is something so soothing and wonderful about seeing all these huge production lines click into place. Drugs need to be evolved into better and better drugs, side effects can be removed, drug boosters can be added. Everything you need to make for some super trippy factory lines.

There's research trees for different tools, competitors trying to outsmart you, and (with the expansion) sales reps to market your products Skrelli-style. A lot of the challenge of the game play isn't just in the building, but also in the managing of your budget. You really need to manage your income and your production costs to stay afloat. So you end up building in bursts most of the time. Fortunately good time controls make this easy.

There is a boatload of missions in this game that keeps it interesting and fresh. I went through a lot of them before finally hanging up my factory keys. Highly recommended!

A game that reminds of the great Theme Hospital but sadly is not one - although it is not a bad game in itself.

Big Pharma is a game about drug production by setting up processing lines that change different ingredients into a drug that can be sold with profit. You get a number of machines that can change the drug intensity, upgrade it or remove side affects that come along. Each steps of course comes with a price and it's up to you judge if you want a better drug or make more money on it - sometimes both means the same but not always.

The visual aspect and general user interface are really great. A bit old school but well designed and look.

The processing line design is pretty fun - I must admit. In general it's a puzzle - place more cheaper machines that takes less space or more costly ones that do the job for three but at higher cost. Either way you have to judge space requirement over probable income loss. Depending on the drug complexity the processing lines can be quite long and interesting and putting them up together is the meat of the game. You need to watch for side effects, adjust proper concentration, mix them together to combine certain effects in order to upgrade them. The whole marketing model is quite complex and opponents do put up a fight.

Apart from that you get scientists you can hire in order to discover more complex machines and other enhancements. You also get to hire people to discover other ingredients curing different diseases. They're costly so you need to manage this as well.

There are some issues though - ones that really spoil a lot of the fun. First of while the theme is interesting it causes the names to be hard to remember. This goes especially for ingredient names and diseases treated - I could not remember them whatsoever and had to constantly check by hovering over or visiting cures screen. Fact that processed drugs at each stage look almost the same - apart from the small distinction in colour does not help at all. The machine names are easier to remember but just a little. Also the fact that once you research Creamer there is no point in shipping pills is also off putting.

But the worst offence was a combination of trying to optimize the output combined with competition. The game gives you a packaging machine. This enables storing multiple drugs in a single package, thus the packages contain more but are less frequently occupying the conveyor belt. This lets you output multiple drugs into a single slot. The number of slot is limited and you can use them both for input and output - thus makes sense to have 4 inputs and single output - and is doable. However if your opponent gets a patent on one of the drugs you're producing you are screwed. The forbidden drug will stop the export and halt all four lines to a point in which you have to manually delete and replace the conveyor belt in order to get your other lines working. Really annoying and proves that optimizing this area is pointless.

Overall apart from the problems noted the game is pretty good. Has it's flaws but did enjoy it. Though probably will not get back to it again.