These days it seems you can find a simulator title for most
things, Surgeon Simulator, Suspension Railroad Simulator, Goat Simulator, even
being a slice of bread, but all of those pale in comparison to building and
maintaining your own pharmaceutical drugs factory and empire.
Big Pharma is exactly that, you’re initially given a basic
work space with an import entrance for your medicinal ingredients and then the
other side of the room is a shipping exit where you aim to funnel your finished
products, sounds simple right?
The core of the game is very reminiscent of “Pipe Dream”,
get your product from the entrance to the exit using the equipment and conveyor
belts available to you, this is where the similarities end, when your base
ingredients enter your factory they aren’t quite ready to utilise as drugs and
require you to alter their various concentrations with machines in order to
activate their medical properties before converting them into pill form and
sending them out to the public.
Once you’ve got your basic product(s) shipping and bringing
in a steady flow of cash, you can recruit explorers to investigate world areas
for extra ingredients with newer medicinal benefits, hiring scientists to
conduct research will give you additional areas to explore as well as bigger
and better equipment options and even monetary discounts for importing and
exporting the various products you’ll need or sell in-game.
With each basic remedy you create you’ll get a cure tree, this
guides you to where you’re medicines can progress next, lower an item’s
concentration enough, run it through an Agglomerator, and instead of just
soothing cold symptoms, you’ve got yourself an antibiotic, finish your
production line with a Pill Printer and apart from giving your new drug a name,
you’re ready to ship to the masses, harsh side effects damaging sales? Research
and build yourself a Creamer, now your antibiotic can be applied topically
with 50% less negative reactions.
Before Big Pharma I don’t think I’ve ever played a game
where I got stuck in the tutorial, nothing seemed to be making any sense as to
why my headache tablets weren’t gaining their upgrades to curing migraines, I
traced my steps backwards to the last point a positive effect occurred and
remade my assembly line where this time it worked and it all just clicked,
in-game and in my head too.
I still wasn’t very good to say the least but I now had a
vague idea about what I was doing and was able to venture out of the tutorial
and attempt the first challenge scenario, make a million dollars within 10
years, long story short I failed, but eventually found my stride and carried
on, working out combining ingredients to add additional cures into existing
products or lessoning side effects to make a product better than that of a
rival.
The next scenario involved supplying the public with 150
appetite suppressants within 8 years, I started out small, soothing coughs and
treating diabetes until I could afford to send my explorers to the deserts to
discover digestion-related ingredients and build the equipment needed to
upgrade those ingredients from calming acid reflux to alleviating stomach
ulcers up to finally suppressing appetites, then after a slight switch-around
with machine placement and a short spell spent wondering why I was only
producing sugar pills, my final product was complete and ready to ship.
Even with a few hours of play under my belt I still find
myself a little overwhelmed with the amount to do in Big Pharma, staying ahead
of the competition, keeping up with global events, balancing ingredient and
production costs, and tweaking cures to factor out side effects to ensure sales
remain good of products my company has already been producing for a while, or
completely scrapping a line in favour of making room for something new and more
profitable.
If that doesn’t sound like a lot already, with the “Marketing
and Malpractice” DLC you can alter your drug prices depending on market demand,
if your rival has a similar product, undercut them, bribe doctors to increase
sales but risk damaging your reputation, fix the results of overseas trials or
even use campaigns to make the public think they’re sick and need your drug to
survive.
Everything gels together really nicely, with a steady
production flowing, you can turn your attention to researching new equipment or
ingredients, applying upgrade points to machinery to lower production costs, or
tweaking discounts on products for optimum profit, or assigning reps to
struggling products to push up sales, if anything requires your immediate
attention the game tells you, be it a world event alerting you to a spate of high
pollen and more people requiring antihistamines or a rival pharmaceutical releasing
a new or equivalent product.
The graphics are bright and clear, though can get a little
confusing when you have multiple production lines operating in close proximity,
but generally as long as you actually give some thought to the placement of
your machines and conveyor belts then losing track of what has gone where won’t
be a big problem, the menus do feature a lot of information but once through
the tutorial and with a few scenarios completed everything starts to make sense
and before long you’ll find yourself engrossed, I was so busy working on my
drug that removed genital warts and combatted ADHD that before I knew it the
clock had long past midnight and I was going to have a very tired day at work
in a short time.
Big Pharma reminds me of the days of classic gaming,
spending hours engrossed in the building and maintenance of your own little world,
it has a Pipe Dream, Theme Park and Sim Hospital flavour, it’s simplistic yet
complex with loads of different challenges and scenarios, plus the soundtrack
has such a catchy retro sound that if it doesn’t get stuck in your head then
you’re probably dead, though I think I’ve got a cure for that.