BIG PHARMA - PS4, XBOX, SWITCH and PC for around £20
BACK OF THE BOX QUOTE
"A Warehouse Full Of Drugs and Ionisers”
Big Pharma is a video game that enables you to take a whole host of raw ingredients and contraptions and plan out a production line to create drugs that cure various ailments.
You’ll need to take into consideration many factors during the process of creating new drugs. These things will range from processing costs, side effects, ingredients concentration, whether the drug will be a pill, a cream or an injectable item.
You’ll also have to plan the logistics of fitting all of your high tech machinery into your warehouse/lab for making the products and getting it out to market.
This game is a Tycoon game that will have you keeping an eye on the bottom line whilst you try new methods and research new items in order to expand your pharmaceuticals empire.
Creating your first pill and shipping it was a great sense of achievement as I saw the raw ingredient go through the various stages of production visually and then get turned into pill before going out of the door into the market. The way this is portrayed on screen is brilliant and gives you a great sense of satisfaction.
The Zen-like nature of plotting out your conveyor belt configuration and adding in the various different contraptions is a joy to behold. It reminded me of when I would plan out my Prison layouts in Prison Architect.
Each machine looks and behaves significantly different from the rest of the machines which leads to some eye-pleasing setups in your laboratory.
The sheer number of different ingredients and setups to play with along with research projects to undertake left me with so many options to tinker with that I lost many hours plotting how my next product would be achieved with the minimum outlay and the maximum profit.
I played the Switch version and the Tutorial text was annoyingly placed over the top of the ingredient information which meant I couldn’t see all of the pertinent information about the ingredient whilst following the tutorial.
Within the tutorial, there were some mismatches between the words in the tutorial and the names of the machines such as Vaporiser and Evaporator and Marker and Maker. This was a small thing but a little confusing at first when I was trying to learn the mechanics and basics of the game.The ingredient information annoyingly auto scrolls on the screen which can lead to you missing the piece of info you were looking for and having to wait for it to scroll again.
This feels like an odd design choice as surely it would be better to have the option to manually scroll through the info or to hold the auto-scroll while you calculate what you need to do with the ingredient in order to upgrade it etc.
Summary
This game fits nicely onto the Switch and has been my go-to game in the evening whilst I sit downstairs and my wife watches Caitlyn Jenner on TV.
It was actually quite an education to get a distilled version of how a drug is made from ingredient to pill and I enjoyed going through the journey of discovery.
Where it is slightly let down is in the delivery of the tutorial which was at times a little head-scratching and confusing due to the grammatical errors in the on-screen text.
With all that being said though, this is a great example of a Tycoon Management sim that has a Theme Hospital feel to it without the patients to get in the way of your progress.
Just imagine this as Theme Hospitals DLC where you get to manage the production line before supplying drugs to your theme hospital.
For management sim and strategy geeks, this will tick a lot of boxes and I will, therefore, award this game a strong melting rating.
Right, I’m off to research the side effects of administering a wart removal cream whilst also trying to work out a cool looking way for my conveyor belts to get my cream pots out of the lab door.
💧❄️ RATING: MELTING ❄️💧
Ratings Explained
ICE COOL (Great Game Recommended)
MELTING (Recommended with reservations, one to consider if you are a fan of the genre)
MELTED (Not A Recommended Purchase)
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